Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 71, No. 436, February 1852Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 71, No. 436, February 1852
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
Mr Lake Price has certainly shown good taste in suppressing the
more revolting and painful details of bull-fights. The bloody
minutiæ of the spectacle would have spoiled his pictures. In
painting bull-fights, as in painting battles, the artist must
leave to imagination by far the greater part of the gaping wounds
and streaming blood, and horrible mutilations. No field of severe
battle was ever painted, we apprehend, exactly as it appeared to him
who walked over it just as the fight was done. The fidelity of a
daguerreotype would be inadmissible in such cases. Imagine an exact
representation of Borodino's redoubt, or Albuera's heights, at the
very moment of the battle's close, before the fast-accumulating
wounded were half removed, or the ghastly dead committed to the
shallow grave. From such a picture, whatever its artistic merit, all
would turn with shuddering and sickness. If we may compare small
things with great, so it is with bull-fights. The painter, if he
does not actually suppress fact, must at least choose his moment
well, and spare his admirers the more revolting circumstances of
the barbarous sport. For barbarous it really is, and some of the
occurrences incidendal to it doubtless "horrify every Englishman,"
as Mr Ford says; but, at the same time, we have observed that nearly
all Englishmen who pass even a short time in Spain get over their
horror, and become pretty regular attendants at the bull-ring. So
that we must not press too severely on Spaniards for their ardent
and passionate love of a spectacle which, from childhood, they are
accustomed to hear spoken of with enthusiasm, as the finest and most
essentially national sport in the world.
No less than eight of Mr Price's pictures are devoted to the second
act of the Bull's Tragedy, in which the chulos chiefly figure. This
employment is the noviciate of bull-fighting. Great activity and
speed of foot are the chief qualifications requisite.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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