A Pilgrimage to San Isidro

What you're looking at

A long, low frieze of people moving through a dark landscape. At the left, crammed into the foreground, a group of men and women sing with their mouths wide open, heads thrown back, eyes rolled or squeezed shut. One near the front seems to be playing a guitar. Behind them the crowd thickens into a mass of hats, shawls and faces, and then streams away to the right as a procession that winds up a rocky slope and dwindles to tiny marks against the gray sky.

There are hints of different classes in the crowd: humble shawls and caps in the foreground, top hats and what look like nuns' habits further back. At the far right edge, cut off by the frame, a single figure in profile opens his mouth in what could be a song or a groan.

The palette is black, brown, ocher and gray, with a few touches of white on faces and collars. The canvas is huge, about 138 by 436 cm, and the paint is laid on in fast, loose strokes, so that the crowd looks less like a set of individuals than a single creature with many mouths.

What is A Pilgrimage to San Isidro?

The title refers to the romería, the popular pilgrimage, to the hermitage of San Isidro, Madrid's patron saint, held every year around his feast day on May 15. Madrileños crossed the Manzanares to the hermitage on the west bank to drink from its spring, picnic in the meadow and celebrate late into the night. Goya's house, the Quinta del Sordo, stood on that same side of the river, so the festival took place close to the walls on which he painted it.

Goya had painted the same festival once before, in a completely different mood. The Meadow of San Isidro (1788), a small oil sketch for a wall hanging to be woven at the royal workshop of Santa Bárbara, now also in the Prado, shows elegant crowds picnicking in bright afternoon light, with a clear view of Madrid's skyline across the river. In the Black Painting the city has gone, the light has gone and the cheerful picnickers have become a dark, chanting mob.

What does A Pilgrimage to San Isidro mean?

Goya gave none of the Black Paintings titles or explanations, so the meaning is inferred from the image and its setting. Most readings stress the contrast with 1788. A festival that once stood for Madrid's sociable public life has become, thirty years later, an image of a people intoxicated, disoriented and moving in a mass toward something they cannot see. The writer John J. Ciofalo suggested a more personal twist: that the procession is heading for Goya's own house and his haunted imagination.

The picture also had a partner. It was painted on a long wall of the ground-floor room of the house, directly facing Witches' Sabbath (The Great He-Goat). The two are the largest of the fourteen murals and mirror each other: on one wall a nocturnal coven gathered around a goat-devil, on the other a nocturnal pilgrimage singing its way to a saint's shrine. Religion and superstition face each other, and the crowds look much the same.

Its loss of individuality, the way the procession melts into the hillside, has led critics to see it as a forerunner of Expressionism, and especially of the masked crowds of the Belgian painter James Ensor.

Where it hung, and what happened to it

The same ground-floor room held Saturn Devouring His Son, Judith and Holofernes and La Leocadia. All were painted in oil directly on the plaster between about 1819 and 1823.

In 1873–74 the banker Baron Émile d'Erlanger, who had bought the house, had the murals lifted from the walls and transferred to canvas by the Prado restorer Salvador Martínez Cubells. The transfer saved them but damaged them, with losses and retouching throughout. D'Erlanger showed the canvases at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1878 and then gave them to the Spanish state, which accepted the gift in 1881.

This painting should not be confused with another Black Painting with a similar name, The Holy Office (Pilgrimage to the Fountain of San Isidro), a smaller scene of a group of figures in the foreground of a landscape, which hung upstairs.

What to notice

Look at the open mouths in the foreground. Goya paints them as dark holes, almost identical from face to face, and repeats them so often that the eye starts to hear the noise. Then follow the procession back to the right. The figures shrink to dabs, then to a ragged line along the ridge, and finally to nothing. The pilgrimage never arrives anywhere in the picture.

Where to see A Pilgrimage to San Isidro today

The painting is in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, catalogued as La romería de San Isidro. It hangs with the other Black Paintings in a single room on the ground floor, usually opposite the Witches' Sabbath, as in Goya's house. The 1788 Meadow of San Isidro is also in the Prado, which makes it possible to compare Goya's two views of the same festival in one visit.