At the age of just 20, after a period of training in Paris, Casas produced this and other paintings of bullfights which reveal a personal treatment of the novelties he had discovered in that city, especially work by Manet, as well as the mark of Goya, whose work he had seen in the Prado Museum. Having painted a sharp foreground, the artist used overlaid light and dark brushstrokes to achieve a feeling of vibration in the middle ground of the composition, a resort he would use frequently in his subsequent production.

This work has been selected for the project 'Partage Plus – Digitising and Enabling Art Nouveau for Europeana'