Vision

When this small canvas came to Basel, it was catalogued as a Goya. It is barely 20 centimetres tall and about half a metre wide, an oil sketch after one of Goya's so-called Black Paintings, the visionary scene called Asmodea, or Fantastic Vision, in which figures hang in the air above a wide landscape. The timing helps explain how it was made. Between 1874 and 1878 the Black Paintings were carefully lifted off the walls of Goya's house outside Madrid and transferred onto canvas by a Prado restorer, then taken to Paris, where a banker, Baron d'Erlanger, showed them at the World's Fair of 1878, hoping to sell them. Francisco Domingo Marqués was living in Paris in exactly those years, a Spaniard who had grown up copying the dark masters of his own country. This little study is now given to him rather than to Goya, though for decades the museum thought otherwise. The old inventory still carries the name Goya, and the figures still float where he first set them, above a crowd and a distant mountain.