The Fire Eater

See People in sacks

Drawing traditionally ascribed to the series of preparatory drawings for the Follies, on the basis of its technical and compositional similarity and the paper used. However, it does not correspond to any of the prints in the engraved series.

This scene demonstrates Goya's interest in scenes drawn from reality, in this case a street performance by a fire-eater. Perched on a stage, the artist emits a puff of fire with grandiloquent gestures. Behind him, the bottle in which he keeps the flammable liquid can be seen. The spectators are arranged in a roughly drawn horizontal strip running down the middle of the stage.

In his private sketchbooks, Goya also drew inspiration from fairs and other similar spectacles. This is the case of Puppets in a Village or Crowd Making a Circle in Notebook F. In the final sketchbooks, produced during his exile in Bordeaux, Goya also recurrently depicted various characters or curiosities that he witnessed at the fairs in the French city. This is the case of Fair in Bordeaux; Four-stranded Snake in Bordeaux; Crocodile in Bordeaux or Claude Antoine Seurat called the Living Skeleton in Bordeaux.