Time, Truth and History

Over the heads of the three figures in this small sketch, bats and owls flit about in the dark. Winged old Time, hourglass in hand, draws a naked young woman, Truth, into the light, while History sits in the foreground writing it all down in her book and looking back over her shoulder. Goya brushed it quickly, sometime between the late 1790s and 1804, as a first idea. When he later took up the same group for a large allegory, now in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, the night creatures were gone, and the woman at the centre may have become Spain. This sketch is said to have been a gift from Goya to Juan Carnicero, a librarian of the king. In 1875 it was reproduced as an etching in a Madrid print album, in 1918 it was bought in Madrid for the Boston collector Horatio Greenough Curtis, and in 1927 his widow gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts.