Zwei Alte beim Essen

Around 1820 Goya, deaf and in his 70s, was living in a house outside Madrid known as the Quinta del Sordo, the House of the Deaf Man. He covered its walls with dark, private images he never meant anyone to see, the group we now call the Black Paintings. This was one of them, painted straight onto the plaster. Two gaunt figures hunch over a bowl of soup, one grinning like a skull, the other barely a face at all. Decades after his death the paintings were peeled off the walls and transferred onto canvas, which is why the surface looks so scarred, and they came to the Prado in 1881.