The Witches' Kitchen

In June 1798 the Duke and Duchess of Osuna paid Goya 6,000 reales for six small paintings on the theme of witches, to hang in their country house outside Madrid. It helps to know who they were. The Osunas were among the most enlightened aristocrats in Spain, readers of French philosophy, and for them witches were not a fear but a subject to smile at, a relic of the superstition their circle wanted the country to outgrow. The Inquisition still existed as they hung these. Goya was mining the same dark territory of folly and ritual in his Caprichos prints during the same years. Here two figures huddle over a pot in a gloom lit from below, and the scene has long been tied to a witches' tale by Cervantes. He painted it small, easel-sized, meant to be looked at up close by candlelight.