Goya's Black Paintings: The 14 Murals of the Quinta del Sordo

Goya's Black Paintings are fourteen murals that Francisco Goya painted in oil directly onto the plaster walls of his country house outside Madrid, the Quinta del Sordo, between about 1819 and 1823. He was in his seventies, profoundly deaf, and living through a period of political repression in Spain. The images he made there, among them Saturn Devouring His Son, a witches' coven gathered around a goat, two men clubbing each other while sinking into the ground, and a dog's head lost in an empty field, are some of the darkest pictures in Western art.

Goya gave them no titles, never exhibited them and never wrote about them. The names they carry today come from inventories made after he left Spain. Since 1881 the murals, transferred to canvas, have belonged to the Museo del Prado in Madrid, where they hang together in a single room.

What are the Black Paintings?

In February 1819 Goya bought a two-story farmhouse on the west bank of the Manzanares river, across from Madrid. Locals already called it the Quinta del Sordo, the House of the Deaf Man, after a previous owner who was also deaf; the coincidence has fed legends ever since. Over the next few years Goya covered the walls of two main rooms, one on the ground floor and one upstairs, with paintings worked in oil over the plaster.

The name pinturas negras refers to the palette as much as the mood. Goya worked largely in black, umber, ochre and dirty whites, with flashes of red that read like wounds. Many scenes appear to have been painted over earlier, brighter landscapes, which scholars have detected under the surface. The brushwork is fast and loose, sometimes scraped or smeared, closer to the late Titian or to Expressionism a century later than to anything else painted in 1820.

The fourteen paintings

The catalogue now holds the most famous of them, Saturn Devouring His Son. The full set, with the titles that later inventories gave them, is:

1. Saturn Devouring His Son (Saturn)
2. Judith and Holofernes
3. Witches' Sabbath (also called The Great He-Goat)
4. A Pilgrimage to San Isidro
5. Procession of the Holy Office
6. La Leocadia, a woman in black leaning on what may be a grave mound
7. Two Old Men
8. Two Old Ones Eating Soup
9. Fight with Cudgels
10. The Dog
11. Atropos (The Fates)
12. Fantastic Vision (Asmodea)
13. Women Laughing
14. Men Reading

According to the 1828 inventory drawn up by Goya's friend Antonio Brugada and later reconstructions of the house, the ground-floor room held Saturn, Judith, Leocadia, the Witches' Sabbath, the Pilgrimage to San Isidro and the two old men. The upper room held The Dog, Atropos, Fight with Cudgels, Fantastic Vision and the remaining scenes. Pairings matter: Saturn and Judith, both images of devouring and beheading, faced each other near the dining area.

Saturn and the logic of the room

Saturn is the image everyone knows, and the one most worth looking at slowly. The god does not eat a baby, as Rubens painted the myth for Philip IV's hunting lodge in 1636. He grips an adult body, already headless, and tears at the arm. His eyes are wide with something closer to terror than appetite. The body in his hands is pale and almost classical, the god around it a smear of gray and black; the only strong color is the red of the torn flesh.

Read against its neighbors, Saturn stops being a single horror picture. The ground floor sets the father who devours his children opposite Judith, the woman who kills a tyrant; it sets the crowd at the Witches' Sabbath, gathered around a goat-headed devil, against the drunken, singing pilgrims of San Isidro. Goya painted the same festival in bright daylight in 1788, as a full-size cartoon for the royal weaving workshop. Here the pilgrims are gaping, toothless and lit by nothing. The comparison is a measure of how far his view of Spain had darkened.

Why did Goya paint them?

Goya left no explanation, so every reading is a reconstruction. Three strands recur in the scholarship.

Illness and age. In 1792–93 a severe illness left him permanently deaf, and in 1819 he nearly died again; his Self-Portrait with Dr. Arrieta (1820, Minneapolis Institute of Art) records the second crisis. Sickness, old age and death run through the murals, from the gumming old men to the Fates holding their scissors.

Politics. In 1814 Ferdinand VII returned to the throne, abolished the liberal Constitution of 1812 and restored the Inquisition. Goya, a liberal sympathizer, had already recorded the brutality of war in The Third of May 1808 and the Disasters of War prints. The Procession of the Holy Office and the Fight with Cudgels, often read as an image of Spaniards destroying each other, belong to the same disillusioned view. When absolutism was restored again in 1823, Goya transferred the house to his grandson Mariano, and in 1824 he left for France. He died in Bordeaux in 1828.

The private imagination. Goya had been drawing witches, monsters and dreams for decades. The famous print The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799) from Los Caprichos already shows the artist asleep at his desk while owls and bats rise behind him. The Black Paintings carry that vocabulary off the page and onto the walls of a home, with no patron, buyer or censor to answer to.

From the walls to the Prado

The murals survived Goya by luck. In 1873–74 the house was bought by the French-born banker Baron Émile d'Erlanger, who had the paintings lifted off the plaster and transferred to canvas under the supervision of Salvador Martínez Cubells, the Prado's restorer. The process saved them but cost them: areas of paint were lost and retouched, and the original compositions were cropped to fit the canvases. Photographs taken by Jean Laurent around 1874, before the transfer, are now the main evidence for how the murals originally looked.

D'Erlanger showed the paintings at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878, where they attracted little interest, and then gave them to the Spanish state. A royal decree of 1881 accepted the gift. The house itself was demolished in 1909.

The authorship debate

In 2003 the historian Juan José Junquera argued that the Black Paintings could not be by Goya, partly on the grounds that the upper floor of the Quinta did not exist when Goya lived there, and suggested his son Javier as the painter. The Prado and most Goya specialists rejected the theory after reviewing documentary evidence, including the 1828 inventory and the house's building history. The attribution to Goya is the accepted position.

Their legacy

The Black Paintings were barely known until the late nineteenth century. Once the public could see them, they changed how Goya was understood: no longer only a court painter of elegant portraits but a forerunner of modern art. Symbolists, Expressionists and Surrealists all claimed him, and the murals' rough handling and refusal of a clear story anticipate much of the painting of the twentieth century. For a broader look at how artists have pictured mortality and terror, see Death in Art and Dark Academia.