EUGENIO LUCAS VELAZQUEZ (Madrid, 1817 - 1870). "The Possessed". Oil on canvas. Re-framed. It has an adapted frame. Size: 28 x 42 cm; 43 x 57 cm (frame). Follower of Goya, many of the works of Lucas Velázquez portray as in this case the popular festivities or the traditions. A woman in the foreground is surrounded by a group of people who swirl around her. The scene is notable for its dramatism, achieved through the light treatment of the scene and the use of a loose, rapid brushstroke that lends it great expressiveness. The brushstrokes are sole and vivid, with a palette dominated by dark, ochre and earthy tones. The Burial of the Sardine illustrates the upside-down world of the carnival, with its transgression of current values, its interest in primal instincts and the prominence of the common people over the institutions. Lucas Velázquez is undoubtedly the Spanish Romantic artist who best understood Goya`s art, becoming the most important and passionate follower of the Goyaesque universe after the death of the Aragonese genius, whose essence he managed to assimilate to the point of sometimes making it difficult to correctly attribute certain little-studied works. Mentioned since the 19th century as Eugenio Lucas Padilla or Eugenio Lucas the Elder and as a native of Alcalá de Henares, he was actually born in Madrid on 9 February 1817. He began his artistic training as a pupil at the San Fernando Academy, although, dissatisfied with the cold classicism of academic teaching, he preferred to study the great geniuses of Spanish painting directly and at the Prado Museum he copied Velázquez and, above all, Goya, whose work would definitively mark the style and creative personality of this artist. Lucas found in Goya`s compositions an extraordinary vein in which to develop imaginative painting of unleashed passions, fantastic visions and scenes of intense drama in the most genuine Romantic spirit, chiefly scenes of the Inquisition, witchcraft, witchcraft, pilgrimages, manolas and bulls, all of which he learned from Goya and which constitute the most interesting core of his extremely prolific artistic career. In 1850 he also painted the ceiling of the Teatro Real in Madrid, which no longer exists, and later Queen Isabella II appointed him honorary chamber painter and knight of the order of Charles III.