Bull Fight, Seville 

Bull Fight, Seville  

Louis Haghe after David Roberts, 1837 

Hand-coloured lithograph 

Roberts made several sketches of Seville’s bull ring and bullfighting scenes during his nearly five-month stay in Seville between early May and mid-September 1833. The lithograph shown here was reproduced in his Picturesque Sketches in Spain Taken During the Years 1832 & 1833. It is based on a watercolour, which Robert had worked up from an on-site sketch in his studio in London in 1834 (private collection). This lithograph is one of two that the Belgian lithographer Louis Haghe completed for Roberts’s album. Roberts was satisfied with Haghe’s work but disliked the other lithographers’ work and redrew their images on stone himself. In 1839, after returning from his trip to the Middle East, Roberts also worked with Haghe to turn his images into nearly 250 lithographs, which were published between 1842 and 1849.  

The main focus is the bullfight scene in the foreground, showing an early stage in the bullfight when the bull is being weakened by the lancers on horseback. In the background, Seville Cathedral and the Giralda rise above the bullring.  Another watercolour with a similar view (Pilkington Collection, Eton College) served as a basis for an engraving by James Baylis Allen, which was published as the frontispiece to Thomas Roscoe’s The Tourist in Spain. Andalusia (1836). It was a popular image, which was also reproduced by transfer print on a ceramic dish produced by William Adams & Sons as part of their Spanish-themed tableware in the 1830s.  

Title: Bull Fight, Seville.  

Author/Artist: Louis Haghe (1806-1885, lithographer) after a drawing by David Roberts (1796-1864). 

Technique and Material: Hand-coloured lithograph, paper.  

Size: 290 x 415 mm (image), 550 x 370 mm (page).  

Published: Plate 26 from David Roberts, Picturesque Sketches in Spain taken during the years 1832 & 1833. London: Hodgson & Graves, 1837. 

Date: 1837. 

Marks and Inscriptions: on the plate, bottom right: ‘Bullfight Seville’.  

Institution: Barry Ife Collection.