A pristine set of Goya’s famous bullfighting etchings, valued at up to £500,000, has been discovered in an old ledger in the library of a French chateau, reports The Guardian.
The library was full of handsomely bound volumes, but at the back of one shelf the owners found a drab ledger, holding a rather dull series of 90 French military prints – and a few pages further on, a complete pristine set of the first edition of Goya’s La Tauromaquia etchings, apparently forgotten about for more than 150 years.
Severine Nackers, head of prints at Sotheby’s in London, where the set will be sold in April, described the prints, still in the 19th-century ledger ruled for columns of accounts, as “a once in a lifetime discovery”.
The prints were found by the present owners of Château de Montigny, in Eure-et-Loir, northern France, as they went through all the books in their library, probably the first full audit in many generations. In the 1830s their ancestor the Marquis de Laval, once a political refugee to England after the French Revolution, had to build an extension to hold the collection he amassed in his successful career as a politician and diplomat after the monarchy was restored.
The prints are being sold, Nackers said, “because like most owners of a French chateau, they need to invest in the building”.
The Spanish artist, who was fascinated by the bullring and once painted himself wearing the ornate embroidered jacket of a matador, created the set of 33 images in 1815-16, while also working on his harrowing series Disasters of War. Unlike the dangerously political war images, Goya had some hope of making money out of the popular and safe subject of bullfighting.