Der Hund

In 1819 Goya, in his 70s, deaf and recovering from a near-fatal illness, bought a farmhouse outside Madrid known as the Villa of the Deaf Man. Over the next few years he painted straight onto its plaster walls, for no patron and no public, the dark private murals now called the Black Paintings. This was one of them. A small dog's head tilts up out of a rising slope of brown, everything else around it left empty. We cannot even see what the dog is looking at, or whether it is sinking into something. Decades later the fragile murals were peeled from the walls and moved to canvas, which is how they reached the Prado.