Francisco Goya - Madre Infeliz! (Unhappy Mother)

Description: Etching, burnished aquatint and drypoint on laid paper. Plate 50 from "Los Desastres de la Guerra" (Disasters of War). From the third edition, limited to 100 examples. Printed in inks varying from dark sepia to black. Printed in the Calcografia for the Real Academia in 1903. Numbers were added to the plates at different stages in the course of work. Most of the plates have two engraved numbers: the earlier numbers in the lower left corners were sometimes scored through on the plates but were never erased; the final numbers are in the upper left corners. Goya executed the plates for the Disasters of War between 1810 and 1820, during the French occupation of Spain by Joseph Bonaparte (1808 -1813). These nightmarish scenes depicted the atrocities committed by both the French and Spanish during the occupation. They are about the most brutally savage protest against cruelty and war which the visual imagination of man has ever conceived. Goya retained his appointment of court painter under Bonaparte's reign during the French occupation of Spain, but his activity as a painter of court and society decreased. He was torn between his welcome for the regime as a liberal and his abhorrence as a patriot against foreign military rule. After the restoration of Ferdinand VII in 1814, Goya was exonerated from the charge of having "accepted employment from the usurper" by claiming he had never worn the medal awarded to him by the French, and he painted for Ferdinand VII the two famous scenes of the bloody uprising of the citizens of Madrid against the occupying forces, The Second of May, 1808 and the Third of May, 1808 (both in the Prado). No drawing is known. The copperplate is in the Calcografia.

Price: 5249 USD

Location: Cary, North Carolina

End Time: 2025-02-03T15:28:58.000Z

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