Torero El Buñolero Ignacio Zuloaga

Having cherished youthful ambitions of becoming a toreador, Zuloaga was intimately acquainted with the world of bullfighting and the characters that inhabited it. Prominent among his paintings, which are executed using a moderate palette of colours in a style reminiscent of the Old Masters, are portraits of toreadors, of which the present work is a particularly striking example. Known by his peers as the “doughnut seller”, or El Buñolero, Carlos Albarrán had made a living in his youth selling the Spanish fried dough fritters buñuelos, but at scarcely 20 years of age he found his vocation, ultimately becoming a distinguished figure in the bullrings of Madrid. It was he who opened the bullfight by unlocking the door of the pen and allowing the bull into the ring so that the fight could begin. He performed this task for 60 years, until the age of 84, only retiring in 1903. He witnessed the release of the bulls on 16,720 occasions. The artist has portrayed the elderly man in the ornate costume of a toreador, the red tones of his cloak reflected in the colours of the landscape behind him. The subject’s distinctive and expressive features, and the dashing figure that he retained even in old age, were captured in four portraits.

Adriána Lantos