Los Proverbios

Francisco de Goya created his final and most enigmatic print series in the years between 1816 and 1824. The series was published under the title Los Proverbios, although Goya's own captions for the working proofs include the word 'disparates'. As a result, this print series is also known as Los Disparates. Like Goya's 'black' paintings, begun in 1819 after his recovery from a serious illness and filled with macabre visions, Los Proverbios are imbued with an overwhelming sense of dread and appear to reflect Goya's precarious mental state at the time. Each of the etchings depicts isolated figures in dark, often nightmarish landscapes. While some plates appear harmlessly satirical, others depict gruesome monsters or attacks on people. The compositions have few precedents and virtually no parallels in 19th century art, but may be connected with the artist's interest in carnival themes, which he had often explored in his sketchbooks. The fate of the plates after completion is only partly understood. It is known that the series originally comprised 22 plates and was left with Goya's son Xavier upon the artist's departure from Spain. The plates remained hidden until Xavier's death in 1854. Eighteen of them passed through two owners before coming to the Royal Academy of San Fernando in 1862, where they were cleaned and published in the present first edition in 1864. It was only at this point that the series was given a title and individual proverbs were assigned to each plate. The four remaining plates were discovered in the early 1870s in Paris. They were eventually published for the first time in the French periodical L'Art in 1877 and are hence not part part of the present first edition.