Goya’s last series, also on the bullfighting theme, was his smallest—just four prints—but its status among the masterpieces of printmaking is universally recognized. After the Peninsular Wars, the Bourbon monarchy was restored in Spain. This regime became more and more repressive, and in 1824 Goya fled to the relative liberality of France. Settled in Bordeaux, working in the still fairly new medium of lithography, at nearly eighty years old and with his eyesight declining (and having been deaf for several decades), Goya propped up the heavy stones on an easel and drew with the greasy lithographic crayon as though he were working on paintings. The four images he created uncannily capture the intensity and raw violence of the bullring.