EUGENIO LUCAS VELÁZQUEZ (Madrid, 1817 - 1870)."In the Bullring".Oil on canvas.Measurements: 25 x

EUGENIO LUCAS VELÁZQUEZ (Madrid, 1817 - 1870).
"In the Bullring".
Oil on canvas.
Measurements: 25 x 34 cm; 33,5 x 43 cm (frame).
Eugenio Lucas is considered to be the Spanish romantic painter who best understood Goya's art, becoming the most important and passionate follower of the Goyaesque universe after the death of the brilliant Aragonese painter, whose essence he managed to assimilate to the point of making it difficult on certain occasions to correctly attribute some of his works. On this occasion he offers us a scene with a clearly Goyaesque heritage, featuring a couple of majas watching the bullfighting spectacle from the stands of the bullring. The bullfighter seems to be heading towards them as he jumps over the bullring, causing the young women to blush and whisper. The rest of the spectators watching the scene (men in Cordoban hats and women in mantillas) allow us to frame this work within the Spanish regionalist trend, still firmly anchored in Romanticism, where the vindication of the Spanish is not limited to the subject matter but also affects the technical aspect. Thus, we see an impastoed and undone workmanship, rich in material and also in detail, which reflects the brightness of the canvases in the same way as Diego Velázquez did, a great reference point together with Francisco de Goya for a nineteenth-century Spanish school which rediscovered the modernity of its old masters.
Mentioned since the 19th century as Eugenio Lucas Padilla, or Eugenio Lucas the Elder, he was the Spanish Romantic artist who best understood Goya's art. Trained in Neoclassicism at the San Fernando Academy, he soon turned his training around and devoted himself to studying Velázquez and, above all, Goya, whose works he admired and copied in the Prado Museum. In Goya's painting, Lucas Velázquez found the starting point for developing his own imaginative personal painting of fantastic visions and unleashed passions, in the purest Romantic style. He also took his subject matter from Goya and painted scenes of the Inquisition, witches' Sabbaths, pilgrimages and bullfights. In 1850 he also painted the ceiling of the Teatro Real in Madrid, which no longer exists, and later he was appointed honorary chamber painter and knight of the order of Charles III by Queen Isabella II. As a true Romantic, he made several trips, including stays in Italy, Morocco and Paris. His works are characterised by the use of a spirited brushstroke and an unhurried execution, without any concern for drawing, with a dense, impastoed material of great chromatic richness and the presence of strong chiaroscuro. He achieved great success as a genre painter and as a painter of fantastic and sinister scenes, although he was also an excellent landscape and portrait painter. His work is well represented in the Prado Museum, and also in other centres such as the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, the National Art Museum of Catalonia, the Lázaro Galdiano Museum, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Goya Museum in Castres (France).