El encierro de toros

In the 1780s Goya was working for the Duke and Duchess of Osuna, decorating rooms at their country estate outside Madrid. This was the largest canvas he made for them, and he was paid 4,000 reales for it. His own bill describes it plainly as a number of bulls rounded up, with figures on horseback and on foot and its corresponding landscape. It shows the calm before the ring: the animals being sorted and driven across open pasture, not the fight itself. It comes years before the dark, violent bullfight prints of Goya's old age. The painting later left Spain, passed through private hands in Hungary, and its present whereabouts are not known.