None of them was dated, signed or formally named by the artist, who never spoke or wrote about them as far as we know, and never intended them to be seen by the public. The Black Paintings also turn 200 this year, if only approximately. Throughout 2019, the museum is celebrating its bicentennial with high-profile events, including an exhibition of Goya’s drawings spanning his career, from early student sketches in Italy to the last lithographs he made in France. I’ve been known to spend the whole time just looking at the dog (or The Drowning Dog, to use the title it is given here), because I tend to feel the same way as artist and writer Antonio Saura, who called it “the world’s most beautiful picture”. My flat is close to the Prado and I go there a lot on weekday evenings, when admission is free for the last two hours. I have overheard that kind of thing many times in this room: a jokey, defensive sort of irony in response to the spectacular weirdness and bleakness of these 14 images. “Well, these are quite a pick-me-up,” remarks one visitor to Madrid’s Prado museum, as his group moves quickly past the Black Paintings of Francisco de Goya. A desperately expressive little dog appears to plead for rescue, submerged up to its neck in a mud-coloured mire beneath a gloomy, void-like firmament of negative space. A humanoid billy goat in a monkish cassock bleats a satanic sermon to a gasping congregation of witches. A boggle-eyed pagan god feasts on the headless carcass of his own son.
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