Ernesto Icaza

(Mexico City, 1866 – 1935)

Lassoing a Bull

1911

oil on cardboard

31 x 47 cm

Inv. no. CCB030

BBVA Collection Mexico



Ernesto Icaza embodies the more polished version of the “genre painter” who describes anecdotal or familial scenes in everyday situations in the open air. An exponent of charrerías painting, he not only paints in detail the various ways of herding bulls (lazado, coleado, jineteo) but he was also an accomplished charro himself. Icaza contributed to the rise of genre painting which, subtended on the postulates of Romanticism, focused on the never-changing routines of country life instead of the grand themes of history, religious or mythological painting, deemed as superior in the hierarchy of the art world.

In this bucolic image of three men trying to lasso a bull, one can ascertain the meticulous drawing that confirms the artist’s dedication to realism in what is otherwise a rather conventional composition. Icaza’s depictions of life on a hacienda, when the Mexican Revolution had come to its end, mirrors the nostalgia for Porfirio’s dictatorship among certain well-off social classes.