The Pit, on Fight Day

A cockpit interior, late-nineteenth century. The circular pit sits in the center, ringed with sand and lit from above by three oil lamps that cast a warm pool of light on the two cocks at the moment of facing-off. The tiered galleries to the left and right are filled with the silhouettes of spectators — top-hatted gentlemen, bonneted ladies — drawn with the same restraint as the figures in a Meryon etching. The wood of the seats is vertical-plank, the lamp glow is amber, the dust is in the air. It is, deliberately, the most melancholy plate in the Codex.