Don Juan y el Comendador

In the late 1790s the Duke and Duchess of Osuna hung a set of six small pictures in their country house outside Madrid, all of them about witches, spells and the supernatural. Goya, who had recently gone deaf, painted them for private amusement. This one freezes a scene from a Don Juan play then running on the Madrid stage: the murdered Commander returns in his shroud to drag the unrepentant libertine down to hell, and Don Juan sits with his hands on his hips, refusing to flinch. The picture left the Osuna collection at a Madrid auction in 1896 and has not been seen since. We know it today only from old records and copies.