Banderillas en el campo

Goya spent much of 1793 in Andalusia recovering from the illness that left him deaf for the rest of his life, and he came back to Madrid with no court work in hand. In January 1794 he sent a friend at the Royal Academy of San Fernando a group of small pictures painted on sheets of tin, saying he had made them to occupy an imagination worn down by brooding on his troubles, and that they let him try things commissioned work gave him no room for. This is one of them. The setting is a tentadero, the walled pen where young bulls were tested for fight, and the four banderilleros in the middle step through the four stages of planting the barbs, one act broken into its moments. Majos in capes and hats watch from the top of the wall.