In February 1819 Francisco de Goya bought an adobe country house on a rise across the Manzanares from Madrid, looking out over the meadow of San Isidro. He was seventy-two. He’d been deaf since an illness in his forties, and he’d been First Court Painter to the king since 1799. Over the next few years he painted the walls of two rooms in that house, a god eating his own child, a crowd of witches around a goat, two old men bent over a bowl of soup, a dog’s head barely showing over a slope of earth, fourteen paintings that survive, and he never gave one of them a name.
Nobody commissioned them and nobody was ever going to buy them. They were the walls of his dining room and of the salon upstairs, in the house he lived in. They’re known as Goya’s Black Paintings, and the easy reading of them is madness and despair, an old man alone with his nightmares. Put each painting back on the wall where it hung and the set reads like rooms instead, one where you ate and one upstairs, and Goya filled both with things nobody wants at the table.
What are Goya’s Black Paintings?
The Black Paintings are the murals Goya painted straight onto the plaster walls of his own house outside Madrid, in the years between buying it in 1819 and leaving Spain in 1824. The house is known as the Quinta del Sordo, the Deaf Man’s Villa. Fourteen of the paintings survive, and they hang in the Museo del Prado now, as canvases, because fifty years after Goya left, a banker had them taken off the walls.
Goya didn’t title any of them, and neither his friends nor his son mention them in anything that survives. When the French writer Charles Yriarte walked through the house in the 1860s he noted there was no catalogue, so every visitor had to call the paintings whatever seemed right. The photographer J. Laurent shot them on the walls in 1874, and the labels his studio later printed on those photographs turn most of them into sorcerers: Judith and Holofernes is a witch preparing a love potion, the two men clubbing each other are two shepherds fighting with cudgels, and the dog is just Tête de chien, a dog’s head. The first list of names is credited to Goya’s friend Antonio de Brugada. It has no date or signature, its first page is missing, and we only know it from a copy a French scholar published in 1928. The names everyone uses now, Saturn, The Dog, Witches’ Sabbath, all came later, from people who weren’t there.
Every title you’ve read for these is somebody else’s guess at what was on Goya’s walls.
Where the Black Paintings hung in Goya’s house
No plan survives that shows where each painting was, so the house has been put back together from people who stood in it. Yriarte described both rooms wall by wall in 1867. Laurent’s photographs show every painting in its frame with the wallpaper around it, and he fixed a ruler beside each one so it could be measured. The British scholar Nigel Glendinning worked from those photographs and the old deeds for decades, and in 2021 Carlos Foradada and his team at the University of Zaragoza measured the rooms from them, in the feet the old deeds use.
Downstairs was the dining room, thirty-three feet long. In 1857, when Javier Goya’s estate let the house with its furniture, the lease listed what was in that room: twelve chairs in black leather and a solid mahogany dining table that sat twenty, with leaves to add. Walk in through the door and the far wall is the first thing you see, Saturn on the left, Judith on the right.
Glendinning noticed what that room is about. The paintings where people ate are full of eating, a god eating his son, two old men over their soup, and Judith, who in the Bible cuts off Holofernes’ head after a banquet. It’s the decoration you’d expect in a dining room, turned all the way over.
Upstairs was the salon, twenty-eight feet by sixteen, with a balcony in the middle of each long wall. Up there the figures float and fight. Four of them hang in the air with a pair of scissors, two men swing clubs at each other, two more fly over a fortress on a rock. And by the door, on your right as you came in, the dog.
There was a fifteenth painting. When Yriarte came up those stairs, the wall to the left of the door was empty, the mural already cut out, sold to the Marqués de Salamanca and carried off to his palace at Vista Alegre. Many scholars think it’s the picture now known as Heads in a Landscape. Fourteen made it to the Prado.
Saturn Devouring His Son: what it means
The story is old. In Hesiod’s Theogony, Cronos, the god the Romans called Saturn, learns from Earth and Heaven that one of his sons will overthrow him, so he swallows each child the moment it’s born. Hesiod has him swallow them whole. Their mother saves the last one, Zeus, by handing Cronos a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, and he swallows that too.
Goya’s Saturn doesn’t swallow anything. He’s chewing. The body in his hands has no head, his mouth is on what’s left of an arm, his hands dig into its back, and his eyes are open so wide the whites show all the way round. Yriarte stood in front of it on the dining room wall and wrote that it was “a scene of cannibalism that has nothing to do with mythology. The killer is not a god.” He said you turn your head away in horror, and that “this figure with the burning eyelids follows you like a bad dream.”
Run the palette on it and three quarters of the wall is black and near-black, and the rest is dark earth and the dirty flesh of the two bodies. The red doesn’t even get a swatch of its own. It’s a few strokes at the mouth and down the body, too small to count, and it’s still the first thing you see. Your eye goes there and then up to his eyes, and that’s the whole painting.
Glendinning pointed out something else. Saturn also presides over the seventh and last age of a man’s life, from seventy on, and Goya was seventy-two when he bought the house. A god of time and old age, devouring what comes after him, on the wall of an old man’s dining room. It is the old warning of the vanitas still life, that everything passes, with a god eating his son where the watch and the skull would be.
Then the eyes. He looks caught, like someone who knows exactly what he’s doing and can’t stop. In this painting the thing to be afraid of is him.
The Dog: the quietest painting in the house
Upstairs, on the wall beside the door, there’s almost nothing. A slope of dark earth across the bottom, a small head just above it, looking up, and above the head a field of ochre and grey that takes up most of the painting. No monster, no crowd, nothing happening.
Yriarte thought it wasn’t finished. “The surface is grey,” he wrote, “you can see the head of a dog that seems to be fighting against a current, but nothing explains itself.” Laurent’s photograph calls it Tête de chien, a dog’s head, and that is the whole subject.
Painters have made it theirs. The Spanish painter Antonio Saura, fascinated by it since he was a child, worked on his own series called El perro de Goya from 1957 until 1992. He wrote that “the head of the dog emerging, like a portrait of our solitude, is nothing less than Goya himself contemplating ‘what is happening.’” And he tied it to the empty part, the “tremendous importance of the void.”
Nothing has happened yet. There’s only the size of everything above the dog and the dog looking up into it, the void Saura meant. Move the light off the head and up into the field, and the painting gets bigger and the dog gets smaller.
How the paintings left the walls
In 1823, with the liberal government falling and Ferdinand VII ruling as an absolute king again, Goya signed the house over to his grandson Mariano, and the next year he left for Bordeaux. He died there in April 1828. The house passed to his son Javier, then through creditors and developers, and when Yriarte saw it in 1867 he wrote that “the house of Goya and the paintings with it are condemned to death.”
- 1819Goya buys the house, 27 February. He is seventy-two.
- 1819–24He paints the walls of the dining room and the salon upstairs.
- 1823He signs the house over to his grandson Mariano. The next year he leaves for Bordeaux.
- 1828Goya dies in Bordeaux on 16 April.
- 1867Charles Yriarte walks through the rooms and writes that the house and its paintings are “condemned to death”.
- 1873The banker Baron Émile d’Erlanger owns the house.
- 1874J. Laurent photographs every painting on its wall. Salvador Martínez Cubells, a restorer at the Prado, starts moving them onto canvas.
- 1878D’Erlanger shows them in Paris, at the Exposition Universelle.
- 1881He gives them to the Spanish state. They go to the Prado.
- 1909What is left of the house is pulled down.
The rescue came from a banker. Baron Émile d’Erlanger owned the house by 1873, and he had Salvador Martínez Cubells, a restorer at the Prado, lift the paintings off the plaster and onto canvas with the help of his brothers. It took years, from 1874 to 1878. D’Erlanger showed the canvases in Paris at the Exposition Universelle of 1878, and in 1881 he gave them to the Spanish state.
Not everything came off the wall the way it went on. Put Laurent’s photographs next to the canvases and you can see it.
In The Dog, the dark mass that leans over the slope had a hard edge in 1874, like a rock or a ridge, and two small dark marks hung in the air above it, which von Loga in 1909 and Foradada since have read as birds, the thing the dog is looking at. Today the mass is a soft shadow and the marks are gone, which leaves the dog with even less around it than Goya gave it. The Witches’ Sabbath lost more. In July 1875 a Madrid paper reported that Martínez Cubells had moved it whole, a canvas “of more than five metres”. Foradada’s team measures the painted wall at about 5.8 metres. The canvas in the Prado is 4.36. Laurent’s plate shows where most of the difference went, a long stretch of empty ground to the right of the crowd that isn’t there anymore.
Did Goya actually paint the Black Paintings?
In 2003 the art historian Juan José Junquera, of the Complutense University in Madrid, argued that he couldn’t have. He made the case in the magazine Descubrir el Arte, in a book and, with full notes, in the Archivo Español de Arte. It came down to two things. Goya couldn’t have painted walls that hadn’t been built yet, and every report of paintings in the house comes late, after his death, and doesn’t match the ones in the Prado. He pointed to Goya’s son Javier.
The Prado’s answer, as The Art Newspaper reported that month, was that it respected Professor Junquera’s views and still considered the paintings to be Goya’s. The full reply came the next year from Nigel Glendinning, in the same journal, going back through every document Junquera had used.
Goya couldn’t have painted walls that weren’t built yet. As Junquera read the 1819 deed, the house had one floor with attics, so the salon upstairs, and at least half the paintings, came after Goya died.
The deed lists a country house of adobe with its garden and “two low rooms”, which Glendinning read as two single-storey wings beside the house. And the list credited to Brugada already puts paintings on the main floor as well as downstairs in the 1820s.
Nobody close to Goya mentions the paintings. Not his friends in Bordeaux, not his son Javier’s short life of his father, and the deeds that list the furniture of the house never name them. Laurent’s photographs, he argued, were taken after the paintings reached the Prado.
Laurent’s photographs show cracks running out of the walls, through the painted frames and across the pictures, worst in the two on the north side of the salon. That is paint that had been on those walls a long time. The wallpaper around them could have been made before 1820.
If not Goya, then his son Javier, who trained as a painter, and Junquera opened the question of Javier faking his father’s work.
Nothing shows Javier painting anything. No signed picture of his is known. The papers find him as a civil servant, a manager of houses and money, and in 1832 he signs a deed as “hacendado y labrador”, landowner and farmer.
Junquera answered him in 2005. The museum’s position hasn’t moved. Manuela Mena, the Prado’s former deputy director for conservation and research, put it simply in 2019: “Goya’s hand is there.”
The strongest point in Glendinning’s reply is the cracks. You can see them in Laurent’s plates, running out of the plaster, through the painted frames and into the pictures, the wall and the painting aging as one thing. Whatever you think about deeds and attics, those paintings had been on those walls for a long time.
Saturn Devouring His Son in movies
The best known is in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). The Pale Man sits at the head of a long table loaded with food he never touches, and when the girl eats from it he wakes, fits his eyes into the palms of his hands and bites the heads off two of her fairies. Del Toro has said that bite “comes straight from Goya’s painting of Saturn devouring his son.” The borrowing goes further than the bite. It’s a monster at a feast, the same joke Glendinning saw in Goya’s dining room, a table set for eating and a god eating the wrong thing.
Art made for no audience
So what is art for when nobody sees it? Goya didn’t paint these for a church or a king or a buyer. He painted them for the room he ate in and the room above it, for himself and whoever sat at that table, and he never explained them to anyone. That is why every argument about them, the titles, the order on the walls, even whose hand it was, ends up back in the house, in the deeds, the lease and Laurent’s plates. The rooms are the only explanation the paintings came with, and they still feel private because they are the inside of a house.
OBSERVATION - The Audience of My Decisions turns Goya’s situation around. A small dark head in profile sits low in the frame, and over it hangs an eye the size of the sky, the way the dog’s head sits under everything above it. Goya painted for no audience, and this is a figure that can never leave one: its words end on “a witness with no verdict.”
Frequently asked questions
Why did Goya paint the Black Paintings?
He never explained them in anything that survives, and none of his friends wrote about them while he lived. The readings people give are guesses with good reasons behind them: he was seriously ill at the end of 1819, Spain was swinging between a liberal government and an absolute king, and he was past seventy. Glendinning read the rooms as a dining room and a salon decorated the way grand houses were, turned upside down. Manuela Mena at the Prado sees caricature and even humour in the faces.
Where are the Black Paintings now?
All fourteen are in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, as canvases. Baron Émile d’Erlanger gave them to the Spanish state in 1881. The house came down in 1909.
What does Saturn Devouring His Son mean?
It’s the myth of Cronos, who ate his children so none could replace him. Goya made him a chewing, wide-eyed old giant instead of a god, and put him on the wall of his own dining room when he was past seventy.
What is the meaning of Goya’s The Dog?
Goya didn’t say, and it doesn’t illustrate any story. It’s a dog’s head over a slope, under a huge empty field. Antonio Saura called the head “a portrait of our solitude”, and tied the painting to “the tremendous importance of the void.”
Read next
- Why Isle of the Dead feels haunted, Böcklin’s five islands, from Rachmaninoff to Alien.
- The sublime in art, why John Martin’s apocalypses are beautiful because they could destroy you.
- Fuseli’s The Nightmare, sleep paralysis, the word, and Frankenstein.
- What is a Doom painting? Medieval hell painted on church walls, all the way to DOOM Eternal.
References
- Charles Yriarte, Goya: sa biographie, les fresques, les toiles, les tapisseries, les eaux-fortes, Paris, Plon, 1867, pp. 91–96 (“La maison de Goya”): archive.org
- J. Laurent y Cía, Catalogue des photographies, série A, Madrid, 1896, p. 12 (“Fresques détachées de la Quinta de Goya”, nos. 2566–2579): commons.wikimedia.org
- Carlos Foradada Baldellou, Carlos Narbaiza Dorado, José Javier Luis Tello and Alfonso Burgos Risco, “Las medidas de la casa de Goya y sus Pinturas negras en su entorno original,” ASRI 20 (2021), pp. 52–81: revistaasri.com
- Juan José Junquera, “Los Goya: de la Quinta a Burdeos y vuelta,” Archivo Español de Arte 76, no. 304 (2003), pp. 353–370: doi.org
- Nigel Glendinning, “Las Pinturas Negras de Goya y la Quinta del Sordo. Precisiones sobre las teorías de Juan José Junquera,” Archivo Español de Arte 77, no. 307 (2004), pp. 233–245: doi.org
- Juan José Junquera, “La Quinta del Sordo en 1830: respuesta a Nigel Glendinning,” Archivo Español de Arte 78, no. 309 (2005), pp. 83–105: doi.org
- “Doubts cast on authorship of Goya’s black paintings,” The Art Newspaper, 31 May 2003: theartnewspaper.com
- Stephen Phelan, “The Black Paintings,” The Guardian, February 2019, quoting Manuela Mena: stephenphelan.co.uk
- Valerian von Loga, “Goya,” La España Moderna, Madrid, 1 November 1909, p. 76 (the birds in The Dog).
- Valeriano Bozal, Francisco Goya, vida y obra, Madrid, TF Editores, 2005, vol. 2, p. 247 (Martínez Cubells and the transfer).
- Hesiod, Theogony, lines 453–491, translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White, 1914: gutenberg.org
- Antonio Saura, “Iniciales,” in Antonio Saura: Peintures 1956–1985, Geneva, Musée Rath, 1989, p. 17, as quoted by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao: guggenheim-bilbao.eus
- Guillermo del Toro, “Pan’s people,” his sketchbooks for Pan’s Labyrinth introduced by Xan Brooks, The Guardian, 17 November 2006: theguardian.com
- Images: the fourteen paintings, Museo Nacional del Prado, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. J. Laurent’s photographs of The Dog and Witches’ Sabbath in the house, 1874, Fototeca del Patrimonio Histórico (Archivo Ruiz Vernacci), Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural de España, licensed CC BY-SA 2.5 ES (The Dog cropped; the Sabbath joined from Laurent’s two negatives), via Wikimedia Commons. Engraving of the house from Yriarte, 1867, public domain.