POSADA’S BULLFIGHT GAME by José Guadalupe Posada - 1898: Corrida de Toros

José Guadalupe Posada. Corrida de Toros. Mexico: Vanegas Arroyo. [1898] One sheet 38.5 cm x 30 cm. Relief etching, with text in letterpress on green wood ground paper. Some fading and age toning on edge. Very good.

OCLC shows no holdings. No holdings at the Online Archive at California. There are copies at The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art; at The Andrés Blaisten Collection and at the Mexican Ministry of Culture (later variant without the 1898 date). It is listed in Casillas, Juegos y Diversiones de Posada (2013). This is a type of Goose game, where players threw the dice to reach the bullring. "[It] is a board for a board game. It consists of an oval divided into 32 squares that narrate, step by step, what happened in a bullfight. The image that occupies the center of the board shows people arriving and entering the square. In box 1, where the players were to start the course, you can see the square full and ready for the start of the run. Each numbered box shows a maneuver of the bullfighter (or bull) throughout the work, including the death of the bull (box 30) and the drag (box 32). The oval is surrounded by a rectangular margin that forms, at each vertex, a triangular space that the illustrator, José Guadalupe Posada, took advantage of to include images associated with the fiesta brava. At the top, on the sides of the title, appear the heads of a horse and a bull. In the lower corners are represented the picador, on the left, and the matador, on the right. Posada was familiar with the bullfighting theme, not only as a spectator but as an illustrator, as it was a recurring topic in advertising posters and periodicals. Bullfighting had been one of the most important public spectacles since the vice-regal era. In those centuries, the bullfights were part of the celebrations of important political events and legitimized the order of society, as they constituted a showcase of the political and religious authorities of the country. This function was lost in the eighteenth century and the bullfights became a simple spectacle. The brief text that contains the instructions of the game gives us an idea of its popularity because, when explaining which are the boxes that "reward" or "punish" the players, the luck or maneuver that is represented there is mentioned, terms that, at present, are no longer of general knowledge." Mexican Ministry of Culture website Mexicana (translation).