Das Begräbnis der Sardine

This is a scene Goya could have watched from his own window, painted while Spain was hauling itself out of the war against Napoleon that had gutted the country. The event is the Burial of the Sardine, the last riotous day of carnival in Madrid before the fasting of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday. Masked revellers dance toward the river to bury a ceremonial fish, and Goya paints them as a genuinely festive crowd, women in white spinning at the centre. But look at the faces around them, blank and mask-like, the trees grey and bent, and that huge black banner rising over everything with a grinning figure on it. The title came later and it was not his. What he left is a day of ordinary people letting loose, with something colder pressing in from the edges of the frame.