Bandido asesinando a una mujer III

By 1799 Goya was First Court Painter in Madrid, painting kings and queens by day. In private he was making something else entirely — a small run of pictures of a coach ambushed on a lonely road, its passengers robbed, stripped and killed in stages. This is the third scene. A bandit pins a wounded woman to the ground and reaches to finish her with a knife, the bare rocks closing in around them like the walls of a cave. Goya had gone deaf a few years earlier, after a grave illness, and these cabinet paintings were never meant for a palace wall. They stayed together in one collection, the Marqués de la Romana's, for generations.