Goya's Black Paintings
The Black Paintings (Pinturas negras) are fourteen murals that Francisco de Goya painted in oil directly on the walls of his house outside Madrid, the Quinta del Sordo, around 1819–1823. Dark in palette and subject, painted for no patron and never titled by the artist, they were transferred to canvas in the 1870s and have been in the Museo del Prado since 1881. The most famous is Saturn Devouring His Son.
Contents
The house and the circumstances
Goya bought the Quinta del Sordo, a two-storey country house across the Manzanares from Madrid, in February 1819. He was 72, profoundly deaf since 1792–1793, and about to go through a near-fatal illness. Spain was ruled by Ferdinand VII, whose absolutist government had returned in 1814; the liberal revolution of 1820 opened three years of constitutional rule, ended in 1823 by a French military intervention and a harsh reaction. Goya, who had served as First Court Painter, lived at the Quinta with Leocadia Zorrilla and her children. In 1823 he signed the house over to his grandson Mariano, and in 1824 he left for France; he died in Bordeaux in 1828.
The murals were painted on the walls of two rooms of about the same size, one on the ground floor and one on the upper floor. There is no letter, contract or diary entry by Goya about them. What we know of their original arrangement comes from an inventory by his friend Antonio de Brugada (1828), a description by the French writer Charles Yriarte (1867) and photographs taken by J. Laurent shortly before their removal. X-ray and technical studies show that some scenes were painted over earlier, brighter decorations, probably landscapes, which suggests the dark cycle was a second campaign.
The 14 Black Paintings
The titles below are conventional; none is Goya's own.
| Painting | Original room | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Saturn Devouring His Son | Ground floor | The best-known image of the cycle |
| Judith and Holofernes | Ground floor | Judith raises a sword over the unseen Holofernes |
| The Witches' Sabbath (The Great He-Goat) | Ground floor | Huge frieze-like scene of a crowd around a goat-devil |
| The Pilgrimage to San Isidro | Ground floor | Torch-lit procession of singing, grimacing faces |
| La Leocadia | Ground floor | Woman in black leaning on a mound, often identified with Leocadia Zorrilla |
| Two Old Men | Ground floor | Old man with staff and a shouting figure at his ear |
| Two Old Men Eating Soup | Ground floor | Toothless, skull-like figures |
| Atropos (The Fates) | Upper floor | The three Fates and a bound man floating in the air |
| Fight with Cudgels | Upper floor | Two men beating each other, legs sunk in the ground |
| Fantastic Vision (Asmodea) | Upper floor | Two figures flying above a rock and soldiers |
| The Holy Office (Pilgrimage to the Fountain of San Isidro) | Upper floor | Group of grim, hooded figures |
| Men Reading | Upper floor | Men gathered around a text |
| Two Women and a Man (Women Laughing) | Upper floor | Small, enigmatic scene |
| The Dog | Upper floor | A dog's head above a slope, against an empty field of colour |
The Dog is now often cited as one of the most modern images of the nineteenth century: almost the whole surface is an empty, ochre-brown expanse, with only the small head of an animal looking up from behind a dark slope.
Style and technique
The Black Paintings share a reduced palette of blacks, browns, ochres, greys and whites, with rare touches of red, blue or green. Goya worked rapidly, with broad brushes and probably palette knives, letting brushstrokes and scraped passages remain visible. Faces are caricatural, often reduced to masks with gaping mouths and staring eyes. Crowds merge into a single mass. Compositions are frequently off-centre, with large empty zones (The Dog, The Witches' Sabbath), and lighting is theatrical but without a clear source.
These features link the murals to Goya's late print series, especially the Disparates (Follies), and to his drawings of madness, old age and violence, but here they are on a monumental scale and in colour.
Interpretations
Interpretations divide broadly into three families, which are not mutually exclusive. The political reading sees the cycle as a response to the repression of liberals under Ferdinand VII, with crowds of fanatics, inquisitors and witches as images of an obscurantist Spain. The existential reading connects the paintings to Goya's age, deafness and illness: Saturn devouring his children (see Saturn and Cronus), the Fates, the old men eating soup and The Dog all speak of time, death and isolation, themes associated since the Renaissance with Saturnine melancholy. The programmatic reading looks at the distribution in the rooms, for instance the ground-floor juxtaposition of male and female violence in Saturn and Judith, under the eyes of La Leocadia.
Since 2003, a minority thesis advanced by Juan José Junquera has argued, from property records, that the upper floor was built after Goya's departure and that the cycle might not be entirely by him. The Prado and most specialists reject this argument; the attribution to Goya remains the consensus.
From walls to canvas
In 1873 the banker Frédéric Émile d'Erlanger bought the Quinta. Between about 1874 and 1878 the Prado restorer Salvador Martínez Cubells removed the murals: the paint layer was faced with protective paper and fabric, detached from the plaster, and laid onto canvas. The operation saved the works but caused losses, flattened the surfaces and required substantial retouching; comparison with Laurent's photographs shows that some details were changed. Erlanger exhibited the paintings at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878, failed to find a buyer and gave them to the Spanish state in 1881. The house was later demolished.
Today the canvases hang together in the Prado's Villanueva building, in a room arranged to evoke the two rooms of the Quinta. For Goya's precedent and rival on the theme of Saturn in the same museum, see Rubens's Saturn; for the wider tradition, Saturn in painting.
FAQ
How many Black Paintings are there?
There are fourteen, all in the Museo del Prado. Seven were on the ground floor of the Quinta del Sordo and seven on the upper floor.
Why are they called the Black Paintings?
The name refers both to their dark palette, dominated by blacks and browns, and to their sombre subjects: witchcraft, violence, old age and death. Goya himself gave them no collective name or individual titles.
What was the Quinta del Sordo?
A country house on the right bank of the Manzanares, facing Madrid, which Goya bought in 1819. The name, "the Deaf Man's Villa", came from a previous owner but also suited Goya, who was deaf. The building was demolished in the early twentieth century.
Are the Black Paintings really by Goya?
The overwhelming consensus says yes. A 2003 thesis by Juan José Junquera questioned the attribution of at least part of the cycle, but it has been rejected by the Prado and most Goya scholars.
Sources
- Museo del Prado, collection records and technical studies of the Black Paintings
- Nigel Glendinning, "The Strange Translation of Goya's Black Paintings", The Burlington Magazine, 1975
- Charles Yriarte, Goya, Paris, 1867
- Juan José Junquera, The Black Paintings of Goya, Scala, 2003