Manuel Domínguez

This original antique lithograph portrays the matador Manuel Domínguez Campos, nicknamed “Desperdicios”, and forms part of the series “Costumbres Andaluzas” made by the Cádiz-born draughtsman Antonio Chamán. The collection, printed at the establishment of Carlos Santigosa in Seville, constitutes a graphic document of 19th-century Andalusian society, integrating the world of the bull into the same cultural context that saw the birth of professional flamenco art.

Manuel Domínguez, a fundamental figure of Seville’s bullfighting, appears represented with the rigour characteristic of Chamán’s drawings. The artist captures in detail the bullfighter’s attire of the mid-19th century, highlighting the ornamentation of the jacket and the details of the traje de luces, elements that the author handled after his period in Málaga portraying popular types. This piece belongs to the section of the series that Chamán devoted to the protagonists of the national festival, thus completing the picture of Andalusian social reality for the Romantic mind.

It is an original hand-watercoloured lithograph of the mid-19th century, in which Chamán’s line is joined to the quality of Santigosa’s lithographic stone. The work possesses biographical value with respect to the bullfighter represented, and functions as a record of the presence of the artists of the period, who, like the bolera dancers and the gypsy girls of Triana that Chamán also portrayed, raised popular customs to the category of professional art.

Manuel Domínguez (Andalusian Customs)