Oil on canvas

In the style of Fernando Botero's "Squad of the Dwarf Bullfighters" from 1988 depicting four figures in the Gran Corrida de Toro.

Born in Colombia in 1932, Fernando Botero left matador school to become an artist, displaying his work for the first time in a 1948. His subsequent art, now exhibited in major cities worldwide, concentrates on situational portraiture united by his subjects' proportional exaggeration. Born in Medellin, Colombia, on April 19, 1932, Fernando Botero attended a matador school for several years in his youth, and then left the bull ring behind to pursue an artistic career. Botero's paintings were first exhibited in 1948, when he was 16 years old, and he had his first one-man show two years later in Bogota. Botero's work in these early years was inspired by pre-Colombian and Spanish colonial art and the political murals of Mexican artist Diego Rivera. Also influential were the works of his artistic idols at the time, Francisco de Goya and Diego Velázquez. By the early 1950s, Botero had begun studying painting in Madrid, where he made his living copying paintings hanging in the Prado and selling the copies to tourists. Throughout the 1950s, Botero experimented with proportion and size, and he began developing his trademark style — round, bloated humans and animals — after he moved to New York City in 1960. The inflated proportions of his figures, including those in Presidential Family (1967), suggest an element of political satire, and are depicted using flat, bright color and prominently outlined forms — a nod to Latin-American folk art. And while his work includes still-lifes and landscapes, Botero has typically concentrated on his emblematic situational portraiture.

H 12.25 in. x W 12.25 in. x D 1.75 in.

H 6.75 in. x W 6.75 in.