Men Reading

Goya never meant anyone to see this. Around 1819 the old, deaf and disillusioned painter bought a house outside Madrid known as the Quinta del Sordo, the deaf man's house, and over the next few years he covered its walls with 14 dark, private murals now called the Black Paintings. This one shows a knot of six men huddled over a printed page, one of them reading aloud to the rest. It stayed on the plaster until the 1870s, when the whole series was painstakingly peeled off and transferred onto canvas so it could go to the Prado. X-rays have since shown that Goya reworked the scene heavily. At one stage the central figure had what look like horns, or perhaps wings, sprouting from his head, which he later painted out.