Paintings & Prints

Twenty-two paintings and prints by Francisco Goya — the artist who spans the distance from Rococo charm to the abyss. Court painter to four Spanish kings, Goya produced radiant tapestry cartoons in his youth, devastating war etchings in his middle years, and the Black Paintings — fourteen works painted directly on the walls of his house — in his bitter, deaf old age. The Third of May 1808, with its anonymous firing squad and its central figure throwing his arms wide in a pose that echoes the Crucifixion, invented modern war painting. Saturn Devouring His Son, with its wild-eyed titan consuming a headless body, is the most terrifying image in Western art. The Dog, showing a single small head emerging from a vast ochre void, is the most mysterious. No other artist contains such range: from the luminous Parasol, where a pretty girl shades herself on a sunny afternoon, to the howling darkness of the Quinta del Sordo, where an old man paints his nightmares on the walls. This collection traces that extraordinary arc — from light into darkness, from the court to the asylum, from beauty to horror — across five decades of Spanish history.