In 1819, deaf, old and ill, Francisco Goya moved into a house known as the Quinta del Sordo, or House of the Deaf Man, on the southern outskirts of Madrid. Removing himself from the proximity of the royal court and the political turmoil of the city, he lived here for the next four years, principally working on preparatory drawings for his ongoing series of etchings, Los disparates, or Follies, and on the cycle of murals whose 14 images have come to be known as the Black Paintings. Using oils, he painted directly on to the plaster walls, covering over a number of landscapes that already decorated them, suggesting that the images he created there were made only for himself. Neither they nor his last great series of etchings, and their accompanying drawings, emerged until some years after his death, in exile in Bordeaux in 1828.
Two hundred years later, the Black Paintings remain by turns nightmarish, bitter, funny and tender. They come across as wounded, both as images and as objects. They have suffered a lot. Goya’s paintings were eventually cut from the walls (some say “hacked”, though the technique used to remove and conserve them was a skilled task) and transferred on to canvas in the mid-19th century. Paint was damaged or lost, and at least one was cut down in size.
