Heads in a landscape

Around 1820 Goya, old and stone deaf, covered the walls of his house outside Madrid with dark, private images now known as the Black Paintings, made in the wake of a war and a wave of political repression he had watched up close. This picture is usually grouped with them, but it is the outsider of the family. It never joined the others when they were later peeled off the plaster and moved to the Prado, and it sits today in a private collection. Scholars still argue whether it truly belongs to the series at all, and even whether the hand is Goya's own or that of his son Javier. Out of a murky landscape of trees and a cliff, a cluster of human heads pushes up into the light at the lower edge.