Fight with Cudgels

Fight with Cudgels (Duelo a garrotazos or Riña a garrotazos) is one of the Black Paintings that Francisco Goya painted in oil on the walls of his house outside Madrid between about 1820 and 1823; transferred to canvas from 1874, it is in the Museo del Prado.

Goya bought the Quinta del Sordo by the Manzanares in 1819. This scene was on the upper floor, on the left-hand wall seen from the door, sharing the wall with Atropos (The Fates) with a window between them. Goya gave none of the murals a title; old inventories call this one The Strangers or Cowherds. Technical study shows the Black Paintings were laid over earlier rural scenes with small figures, and Goya reused the landscape of one of them here.

Two men face each other at close range, swinging heavy clubs, pushed to the far left of the canvas, while gentle ochre and reddish hills and a blue sky open out to the right. The off-centre balance breaks academic rules, as in other Black Paintings, and the handling is rapid and thinly loaded. Foreign writers of the 19th century took it for a rural Spanish custom; Charles Yriarte placed it in Galicia. Spanish critics have preferred symbolic readings: discord between men, civil war, or the fratricidal struggle of liberals and absolutists in the years of the Liberal Triennium. Francisco Javier de Salas linked it to an emblem by Diego de Saavedra Fajardo based on the myth of Cadmus, whose sown warriors killed one another.

The famous detail of the two men sunk to their knees may not be Goya's. Nigel Glendinning in 1975, and Carlos Foradada in 2010, compared the canvas with photographs taken by J. Laurent around 1873, before the transfer, and argued that Goya had painted the fighters standing on grassy ground; large areas lost in the move were covered over below the knees. Baron Émile d'Erlanger, who commissioned the transfer, showed the murals in Paris in 1878 and gave them to the Spanish state in 1881. The canvas measures 125 × 261 cm.