Two Old Men

What you're looking at

A tall, narrow canvas, almost entirely black. Out of the darkness steps an old man with a long white beard and a mane of gray hair, wrapped in a brown habit or cloak. Both his hands rest on the crook of a long staff, which runs diagonally down to the bottom left corner like a single pale stroke. His eyes look out and slightly down, calm and a little tired.

Pressed close behind his right shoulder is a second figure, and it belongs to a different world. Its face is in profile, bald and lumpy, with a jutting jaw and a mouth wide open, pushed right up against the bearded man's ear. Whether it is shouting, whispering or simply gaping, the effect is of a noise the old man does not seem to hear. One of its hands, little more than a few strokes of ocher, appears in the shadows below.

Goya keeps the color to brown, black, ocher and the yellowish white of the beard. The light falls on the beard, the hands and the head of the staff, and almost nowhere else.

What does Two Old Men mean?

Goya never explained the picture, and the title was supplied after his death. Inventories and later writers have called it Dos viejos (Two Old Men), Dos frailes (Two Friars) and Un viejo y un fraile (An Old Man and a Friar), because both figures wear something like a monk's habit.

The most common reading starts from biography. A serious illness in 1792–93 left Goya completely deaf, and by the time he painted the walls of his house he had lived in silence for more than a quarter of a century. A grotesque figure yelling into the ear of a dignified old man who stands unmoved reads easily as a picture of deafness: the world shouting, the old man elsewhere.

Other readings sit alongside that one. The second figure is so bestial that some writers connect it with Goya's long fascination with madness, which he had explored in asylum scenes and prints. The bearded man, with his staff and his look of patient thought, has been compared with the ragged philosophers that Velázquez painted, which Goya knew and had copied as etchings. A less favored reading makes the old man Chronos, the god of time, with his companion as a memento mori whispering that the end is near.

None of these needs to exclude the others. The picture works as a portrait of old age in which wisdom and decay, the serene and the monstrous, travel together.

How it fits the Black Paintings

Two Old Men is one of the fourteen Black Paintings that Goya painted in oil directly onto the plaster walls of the Quinta del Sordo, his country house across the Manzanares from Madrid, between about 1819 and 1823. It belonged to the ground-floor room, where it is usually placed across from Judith and Holofernes. In the same room hung Saturn Devouring His Son, La Leocadia and the two great frieze-like crowd scenes, the Witches' Sabbath and A Pilgrimage to San Isidro.

The open mouth links it to the rest of the series. Robert Hughes noticed that a "gaping void," an open mouth, recurs throughout the Black Paintings: Saturn's jaws, the singing pilgrims, the leering women. Here the open mouth belongs to a figure close kin to the skull-like eater in Two Old Men Eating Soup, whose face is very similar.

Condition and restoration

The murals were lifted from the walls and transferred to canvas in 1873–74, under the Prado restorer Salvador Martínez Cubells, for the banker Baron Émile d'Erlanger, who then owned the house. The process damaged them. In this picture the restorers added highlights to the main figure and reworked parts of his face and hands, softening contrasts that were probably harsher in Goya's original. That is worth remembering when the old man looks gentler than the rest of the series: some of that gentleness may belong to the nineteenth century.

D'Erlanger exhibited the canvases at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1878 and gave them to the Spanish state, which accepted the gift in 1881.

What to notice

Look at the staff. It is the longest single line in the composition, and it does structural work: it props up the old man, cuts the black field in two and leads the eye from his hands down to the floor. Then look at the second figure's ear-level mouth. Goya has painted it on the same plane as the old man's ear, so close that the two heads almost merge. Painted on the wall of a house where its owner could not hear, the effect is stranger than any caption.

Where to see Two Old Men today

Two Old Men is in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, where the Black Paintings hang together in a single room on the ground floor. The canvas measures 142.5 by 65.6 cm, a tall format that comes from the narrow strip of wall it was painted for.