Le petit picador jaune (English: The little yellow bullfighter) is an oil on wood painting by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, which he created in 1889 at the age of eight.
[2] Picasso’s early artistic skills are evident in this painting, which was created before he had received any formal art training.
There the now thirteen-year-old Picasso created a drawing for the entrance exam within the course of a day, a task that would normally take an entire month.
The composition is of a bullfighter on horseback, dressed in bright yellow, who is the focus of the scene, with three spectators standing outside the bullring.
The violence that the young Picasso would have witnessed at the bullring in childhood was a recurring element of his work, not least of all in his 1937 painting Guernica, in which the presence of a bull has been interpreted as a symbol of death.
[12] Another recurring motif in this painting is the presence of a horse, a subject which appears time and again throughout Picasso’s work right through to his later years in the 1960s, including Guernica.
Picasso was particularly attracted to the subject due to its powerful contradictions of grace and brutality, entertainment and tragedy, and life and death.
The play of domination and subjugation, grandeur and pathos which characterises his pictures of bulls and their Cretan cousin the Minotaur, is essentially a product of that almost religious intensity of the rituals of the ring.
"[14] Helen Newman, Global Co-Head of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Department & Chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, commented on Picasso's depictions of the bullfight, "Through the subject of the bullfight, Picasso explores the theme of life and death, creation and destruction, earth and sun, casting himself at the centre stage of the spectacle.