Interior of a prison

After a severe illness in the winter of 1792 to 1793 left Goya deaf, he began making a set of small pictures for himself rather than for a patron, painted not on canvas but on sheets of tinplate. He called them works of his own invention, and their subjects turned dark: shipwrecks, fires, madhouses, bandits and prisons. This is one of the prison scenes. A few figures sit chained under a heavy vault, and a single fall of light from one side leaves the rest of the room in brown shadow. There is no named crime and no story, only confinement. Scholars still disagree on exactly when he painted it, some putting it close to that illness in the 1790s, others in the war years after 1808. It hangs today in the Bowes Museum in the north of England.