A Pilgrimage to San Isidro

Goya did not paint this for anyone. He painted it on the plaster wall of his own dining room, around 1820, in a farmhouse outside Madrid he had bought the year before. By then he was in his seventies, completely deaf, and had lived through war, famine, and the return of a repressive king. It shows a religious pilgrimage, a festive event the whole city took part in, but Goya turns the crowd into a dark procession of gaping, wild-eyed faces staggering out of the gloom toward us. Nobody commissioned these murals and it is not clear he meant anyone but himself to see them. They are known now as the Black Paintings, for the heavy blacks and the bleak mood, and this is one of about 14 of them. Long after his death the whole set was cut from the walls and stuck onto canvas, which is why the surface today looks so damaged. They have hung in the Prado since 1889.