The Picador (watercolour painting)

The Picador is an 1832 watercolor painting by the French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, showing the 'tercio de pique' or third phase of a bullfight. It is held in the department of prints and drawings at the Louvre with other drawings of bullfights by the same artist, notably Picador and Chuletillo (lead pencil, 1832).^[1]

The work's small dimensions allowed him to compete with the sinister The Bullfights of Bordeaux by Goya.^[2] Luigina Rossi-Bortolatto considers that the work's poses draw on the painter's The Battle of Nancy, painted the previous year.^[3] The man's simple gesture and the soft colours of the clothes are a major contrast with his paintings such as The Lion Hunt^[4]