Prison Interior

By the time Goya painted this he was stone deaf from a near-fatal illness and had lived through the French invasion and occupation of Spain, and pictures like it were not made to please a patron. It is a small panel, one of a set of grim cabinet scenes of prisons and madhouses he kept largely to himself. A few figures sit chained hand and foot under a high vault, lit by a cold light that falls from somewhere above and turns the stone the colour of purgatory. Goya gives them no crime and no story, only the weight of the irons. John and Joséphine Bowes bought it in 1862, along with more than 70 other Spanish paintings, for the museum they were building in County Durham.