Francisco Goya was the most celebrated painter in late eighteenth-century Spain, widely known for his portraits and religious paintings. In the 1790s, following a near-fatal illness that left him profoundly deaf, Goya turned to drawing to document his thoughts, visions and dreams. In eight private albums, as well as in single sheet drawings, he recorded his astute observations of interactions between men and women, social inequality, folly and vice, as well as images of ‘fantasy and invention’. Goya’s drawings gave expression to a vision of humanity that had no equivalent in the art of his day.

This exhibition presents forty-four drawings on loan from the Prado Museum in Madrid. The works span thirty years of the artist’s career, from his earliest albums of social satires, to pages from the late albums, which contain some of Goya’s most imaginative and surreal images. The drawings are shown together with etchings from Goya’s four major printed series, the Caprichos, Disasters of War, Tauromaquia and Disparates. All of the drawings and prints in the exhibition were uncommissioned, giving Goya the freedom to critique authorities and social norms. They also reveal Goya’s insight into human nature, making his art as relevant today as it was in his own time.

Francisco Goya was born near Zaragoza in north-eastern Spain in 1746 and died in southern France in 1828, his life spanning one of the most complex periods in European history. He witnessed momentous social and political change, including the downfall of the Bourbon monarchy, the impact of Enlightenment ideals on reform agendas, the French occupation of Spain and the brutality of the Inquisition.

Goya rose from humble beginnings to have a highly successful career in Madrid. In the 1780s he took official positions at the Royal Academy and the court, and served four successive monarchs. As painter to the king, he moved in elite circles and painted portraits of statesmen, aristocrats, influential writers and intellectuals. His friendships with liberals sharpened Goya’s political awareness and social conscience, which was evident in his drawings and prints.

Goya’s work became increasingly dark during the years of the Peninsular War in the early 1800s and the subsequent repressive regime of Ferdinand VII, which saw many of his friends exiled. At the age of seventy-eight Goya moved to Bordeaux, where he spent the last four years of his life. He continued to work with undiminished commitment and curiosity, exploring new mediums such as miniature painting and lithography.

In the mid 1790s Goya started work on preparatory drawings for his first series of etchings. He intended to call it Sueños (Dreams) but finally chose the title Los Caprichos (The Caprices), a term that describes a playful invention. In these eighty etchings Goya invented scenarios that expose folly, vice and inequality in all areas of society. Drawing on sources such as emblems, allegorical prints and English caricatures, he created a series of images that was exceptional in its originality, breadth of subject matter, technical skill and inventiveness.

The first half of the series is dedicated to social satires that target marriages of convenience, prostitution, poor education, the aristocracy and the clergy. The second half features allegorical images of superstition and ignorance, represented by monstrous creatures and witches. Each work is inscribed with a title – some explain the meaning of the print, while others create an incongruous relationship between word and image. A manuscript written in Goya’s hand, held in the Prado Museum, provides a commentary on each of the prints, which sheds light on their satirical content. The Caprichos was withdrawn from sale two days after publication, presumably because Goya feared reprisals from the Inquisition.

Goya started to make albums of drawings at the age of forty-eight and continued this practice throughout the rest of his life. Of the estimated 850 drawings that have survived, more than half are in the Prado Museum in Madrid. Goya drew on loose sheets, but the majority of the drawings were once bound in albums with numbered pages. These were not traditional sketchbooks of observational studies but visual journals in which the artist recorded his thoughts on a wide range of subjects. The drawings are carefully considered compositions, and many have the quality of finished, autonomous works. They were intended to remain private, shown only to people whom Goya trusted, except for those he intended to etch and publish.

Goya made at least one drawing for each print to work out the composition and distribution of light. Twenty of these preparatory drawings are displayed here alongside the final etchings. Many examples have the edges of a copper plate impressed on the sheet, which reveals Goya’s working method: he placed the sheet face down on the plate and ran them through the printing press together. The outlines of the drawing were thereby transferred onto the plate, which Goya used as a guide to finalise the composition.

Goya’s most famous print shows an author (the artist) asleep at his desk; nocturnal bats and owls surround him, and a wide-eyed lynx is watching below. Two preparatory drawings for this etching survive, one of which includes an explanatory caption below the image: ‘The author dreaming. His only purpose is to banish harmful, commonly-held beliefs and to perpetuate in this work of caprichos the sound testimony of truth’.

Goya’s moralising and often biting satires sought to unmask the truth behind appearances, exposing the hidden intentions and true nature of his characters. He used allegory and the device of the dream to speak in what he called a ‘universal language’, making the images relevant beyond their place and time, while also deflecting attention away from the individuals he targeted, and avoiding scrutiny and censorship by the Inquisition.

This print was initially intended as the first image of the Caprichos, but in the final sequence it became plate 43, positioned halfway through the series. Still, the etching retains its original function as a frontispiece because it introduces a group of images depicting witches, goblins and fantastical hybrid creatures. The ‘monsters’ produced by the sleep of reason are allegories of vice, falsehood, and superstition.

Goya was sixty-one years old when Napoleon’s troops invaded Portugal and Spain in 1807 in order to seize control of the Iberian Peninsula, and to supplant the Bourbon ruler Ferdinand VII with the Bonaparte King Joseph I. This led to the Spanish uprising on 2 May 1808 and the subsequent Peninsular War, known in Spain as the War of Independence. The brutal six-year conflict was fought by the Spanish army, mercenaries and civilians organised into guerrilla groups.

In his series of eighty etchings, The Disasters of War, Goya portrays warfare with unprecedented realism. These images are far removed from conventional iconography focused on heroes, martyrs and glorious victories. Goya instead examines the human capacity for cruelty and barbarism, and represents the long-term consequences of war, including displacement, poverty and trauma. The series has three distinct parts: warfare and violence, the famine of 1811–12, and allegories of political repression in the period after the war when Ferdinand VII was restored to the throne and a new reign of terror began. Due to its critical and political content, the series remained unpublished until thirty-five years after Goya’s death.

Goya published thirty-three etchings on the subject of bullfighting in 1816, when he was seventy years of age. The advertisement for the series in the Diario de Madrid described La Tauromaquia as representing ‘diverse manoeuvres with bulls and passes … in our bullrings; an idea being given … of the history, evolution and present state of [bullfighting] in Spain’.

Goya had been an aficionado of the bullfight in his youth, but scholars have increasingly seen an ambivalence in his later attitude, especially in La Tauromaquia, which emphasises scenes of violent encounter and death. While Goya’s historical scenes in the series draw upon the 1777 book by Nicolás Fernández de Moratín on the origins of the bullfight, his more critical attitude reflects contemporary enlightened opinion, such as that expressed in the 1807 treatise of José de Vargas Ponce, which condemned bullfighting as a barbarous activity. Goya’s execution of this series in the years of repression and terror following Ferdinand VII’s return to power may also explain its emphasis on violence.

Goya’s etching technique is at its most refined in these large plates, where his handling of even expanses of silvery-toned aquatint and deeply etched linework lend an abstract grandeur to the compositions.

Los Disparates (The Follies), c. 1815–19, is Goya’s last print series and the most difficult to interpret. In these late etchings Goya reworked some of the themes and figures from the Caprichos and the Disasters of War, but the various Disparates images are far more enigmatic, akin to the ambiguous language of dreams. Together they present a profoundly dark view of humanity, characterised by cruelty, madness and absurdity. Their subjects and mood are similar to those depicted in the so-called Black Paintings that Goya painted on the walls of his house around the same time.

The Disparates series was left incomplete and unpublished in Goya’s lifetime. It was not until 1864 that the first edition was printed and published by the Royal Academy of San Fernando, Madrid, under the title Los Proverbios. The prints were thought to illustrate Spanish proverbs, and it was only later that fourteen working proofs with Goya’s manuscript titles containing the word ‘disparate’ (‘folly’ or ‘absurdity’) were discovered and the series title changed. Made with brush and red wash, the preparatory drawings for the Disparates are freely drawn, and Goya resolved much of the compositions directly on the etching plates, often altering them significantly during the printing process.

In September 1824 Goya settled in Bordeaux, France, after leaving Spain in 1823 in the wake of the repressive crackdown on liberals that followed Ferdinand VII’s restoration to power. Here, he spent the last four years of his life, which were extraordinarily productive and bear witness to his undiminished powers of invention and technical experimentation. Goya produced a series of miniatures on ivory of astonishing freedom, a group of lithographs that set a new benchmark for the medium and two final albums of drawings (Albums G and H) that include some of the most terrifying images he ever made.

Rather than brush and ink, which Goya had employed in his earlier albums, he turned to black crayon for his final drawings, a choice perhaps influenced by his recent experience of the print technique of lithography, which uses a greasy crayon. A new breadth of handling is evident in the nearly two hundred drawings comprising Albums G and H, in which the artist returned to favourite themes including violence, madness, old age and social parody. It has been suggested that Goya was planning a new series of caprichos to which these drawings, which encapsulate the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime, may have been related.

Goya used a variety of techniques to make his drawings, employing both wet mediums (such as ink) and dry (such as chalk). Sometimes he experimented, while at others he chose a medium that suited the specific purpose of the drawing – such as a preparatory study for a print.

For his earliest album drawings, Goya used a thin brush and very diluted carbon black ink, which has the appearance of a pale grey wash. Working in stages, he layered brushstrokes of ink, allowing him to convey depth, volume and a remarkable level of detail – such as the nuances of facial expressions and gestures – on a small scale.

Using predominantly brush and either carbon black or the more available iron gall ink, Goya returned to making drawings in private albums during the Peninsular War (1808–14). These drawings become increasingly loose, even rough at times, as Goya experimented with different densities of ink and wash on the brush, as well as scraping (scratching the surface of the paper with a sharp blade to remove areas of ink) – an unconventional technique which he used throughout his album drawings to make corrections and create highlights.

In 1797 Goya began a series of mostly imaginative drawings, now known as the Sueños (Dreams), some of which he developed into prints for the Caprichos. Most of these were made using a quill pen and iron gall ink (a black ink that ages to brown, made from oak galls mixed with sulphate). These drawings are characterised by varied lines created by holding the pen at different angles, making them comparable in appearance to etchings.

After the Sueños drawings, Goya turned almost exclusively to red chalk to make his preliminary studies for etchings, probably because chalk transferred to the copperplate more effectively than ink. Occasionally he introduced red wash, applied with a brush, to these drawings, which may have helped him work out which parts of the composition to translate into aquatint – a tonal etching technique he began using for his prints from the Caprichos onwards.

The medium of print allows artists to produce multiple copies of an image, and to communicate their ideas to a wide audience. Goya chose etching, a technique still relatively new in Spain at the time, for his major print series. An etching is made by coating a copper plate with an acid-resistant ground, and using a needle to draw an image through this layer to expose the copper beneath. The plate is then immersed in acid, which etches or ‘bites’ linear grooves into the exposed copper. Lighter and darker lines can be created through multiple bitings in a staged process. A stop-out varnish is used when the artist wants to prevent certain parts of the plate from being etched any further, thereby building gradations of tone, from the white of the paper to deep blacks.

When the image is complete, the ground is removed and the plate is inked. The etched parts hold ink, and the unetched areas are wiped clean. When the inked plate is run through the press with a sheet of dampened paper, the ink is transferred to the paper. Goya made amendments while working on a plate and printed impressions (called proofs) to check his progress. These amendments could involve further etching, or the removal of unwanted etched marks by scraping the surface and burnishing (polishing) the metal. Goya frequently used a burnishing tool to produce halftones and highlights by smoothing out deeply etched parts of the plate. He also added lines by engraving the plate, using the burin tool or a drypoint needle, to cut directly into the copper without acid-biting.

Etching was predominantly a medium for linear compositions, but additional techniques were developed to create tonal range. The most important of these was aquatint, which was invented in France in the 1760s, but not yet widely used by the time Goya started work on the Caprichos plates. In the aquatint process, a layer of powdered resin is fused to the plate through heating. When the plate in submerged in an acid bath, the exposed copper around each minute particle is ‘bitten’, creating tiny indentations in the surface that hold ink and print as a textured even tone. Goya experimented with this technique, creating one image in the Caprichos (plate 32) entirely with aquatint, and exploiting its full tonal range in the nocturnal scenes. He subsequently used aquatint to create the sombre atmosphere of the Disasters of War, and the menacing darkness in the Disparates series.

Goya also experimented with a process known as lavis, which mimics the effects of an ink wash. By brushing acid directly onto the unprotected plate, whole areas could be lightly etched to give a warm tone, as in several plates in the Disasters of War and Tauromaquia series, displayed in the next room.