A spearman

By 1795 Goya could no longer hear the bullring. An illness three years earlier had left him permanently deaf, yet he kept returning to the thing he had loved since boyhood, the bulls. A garrochista is the rider who works the animal from horseback with a long pole, the garrocha, and Goya knew the type well enough that he once signed himself Francisco of the Bulls in a letter to a friend. The Prado lists this small canvas as attributed to him rather than fully documented, and specialists still weigh whether the whole hand is his. What is plain is the sympathy for the mounted man and his horse, brushed up quickly in browns and greys, more than 20 years before Goya turned the same subject into his great series of bullfighting prints.