Timely folly

A young woman rides a horse standing upright and holding it by the reins. The horse, in turn, swings on a rope that runs from side to side, the ends of which are outside the frame of the picture. In the background, a crowd enjoys the circus show. 

Against the black background, the whiteness of the magnificently modelled horse and the girl is silhouetted against the black background. The girl is dressed like a maja, with a neat chignon tied high on her head, and expresses a restrained tension. Both she and the horse seem serene despite the difficult balance. This is because, if we look closely, we can see how the rope rests on the ground, not implying any kind of risk. While in other prints Goya criticises unbridled passions, in this one he possibly does the opposite: he reproaches excessive control, as no extreme is good for the human spirit. It has also been seen as a representation of the difficult balance of feminine virtue over natural passions, symbolised by the horse, under the gaze of an unscrupulous public watching for the fall.

This evocation of the circus is related to an image that may have remained in Goya´s memory from one of his visits to the circus. In it he fuses two types of spectacle: tightrope walking and the acrobatics of the amazons on horses.

The audience in the background is dissolved by a vertical stripe, which leaves it semi-transparent as if it were seen through a lattice. The parallel touches of drypoint on the horse stand out.