Still Life with Golden Bream

Goya painted this while Spain was tearing itself apart. From 1808 the country was locked in a brutal war against Napoleon's occupying army, and Madrid was gripped by famine, the same years Goya was recording starved and broken bodies in his prints called The Disasters of War. He made only about a dozen still lifes in his whole life, nearly all of them in this period. Here several sea bream lie heaped on wet sand, their bellies gleaming and their eyes glassy in a cold light. He gives them the same unsparing attention he gave the human dead. These still lifes stayed in his own possession, listed together in an inventory of his household drawn up in 1812.