Saturn Devouring His Son

Goya painted this straight onto the plaster wall of his own dining room, and he painted it for no one. In 1819, old, deaf and half-broken by the wars he had lived through, he bought a house outside Madrid and covered its walls with fourteen dark scenes now called the Black Paintings, never meant for sale or for any eye but his. This is the grimmest of them, the god Saturn, who ate his children rather than be overthrown by them, caught mid-bite with a wild stare. There was no commission, no title, no explanation left behind. Long after Goya's death the murals were peeled off the walls and moved onto canvas, which is how a picture he made only for himself now hangs, wall-turned-canvas, in the Prado.