Goya's Black Paintings
Deaf and in his seventies, in a farmhouse outside Madrid, Goya painted fourteen dark scenes straight onto the walls of his own rooms.
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About the series
Goya bought the Quinta del Sordo, the Deaf Man's House, by the Manzanares river in 1819, years after an illness had left him completely deaf. Over the next few years he covered the plaster walls of the dining room and the room above with oil paintings in blacks, browns and ochres. He never gave them titles, and they were never shown in his lifetime.
Saturn devours his son in the dark. A crowd of pilgrims sings its way home from San Isidro. Two men fight with cudgels, sunk up to their knees. A small dog looks up from behind a slope into an almost empty space. In the 1870s the paintings were taken off the walls and moved onto canvas, and they were later given to the Prado in Madrid, where they hang today.
They are not easy pictures. The Dog, the quietest of them, is the easiest to live with.
