Four characters hold off the charge of a bull using a basket (preparatory drawing).

See How the ancient Spaniards hunted bulls on horseback in the countryside.

Preparatory drawing for a print of bullfighting which was never engraved, or at least of which neither the plate nor any proof of condition has survived. It is on the reverse of another preparatory drawing of the series: The Moors established in Spain, dispensing with the superstitions of their Alcoran, adopted this hunting and art, and they throw a bull in the field.

The scene, of great plastic dynamism, shows us a very original and curious type of popular bullfighting that was and still is practised in some villages along the banks of the Ebro river in Zaragoza, such as El Burgo and Fuentes de Ebro, in which a group of young men standing in line face the powerful onslaught of a steer or bull, protected only by a basket with a stick pierced through the handles, known as a roscadero. As we can see, the memory of Aragonese bullfighting traditions lived on in Goya's mind.

The scene, of great compositional simplicity but with great expressive and plastic power, shows the charge of a bull or steer that lunges from the left at a group of four young men in a row, protected by a basket held by the first of them. Goya perfectly depicts the movement generated by the bull's strong lunge as it lifts the bull's front legs and the first two runners, who are lifted into the air.