Departures of note

Pedro Escacena Barea was born in Seville on 19 November 1931 and grew up in the La Macarena neighbourhood. In his youth he tried bullfighting, taking part in novilladas without horses in the mid-1950s, before discovering that his true vocation lay in painting. He trained at the Escuela Superior de Artes y Oficios de Sevilla and became one of the most singular names in contemporary Spanish bullfighting painting, working mainly in oil on canvas alongside drawings, watercolours and illustrations. His wife Aurora Gutiérrez, whom he married in 1960, served as the model for more than thirty of his compositions. His most celebrated work, Trincherazo de Curro, was created for the corrida held in Pozoblanco in September 1984, the afternoon on which the bullfighter Francisco Rivera Paquirri was fatally gored. He also designed posters for the Real Maestranza de Sevilla bullring in several years of the 1980s and for the San Isidro fair in Madrid in 1985. In 2022 he donated the patrimonial rights to his entire body of work to the public domain, and nearly a thousand pieces were digitized and made freely available online. He died in Tomares (Seville) on 28 September 2026 at the age of 94.