La fragua

Goya painted three blacksmiths at an anvil around 1815 to 1819, and nobody asked him to. There was no patron, no commission, no buyer in his lifetime. In these same years he was a deaf man in his seventies, soon to cover the walls of his own house with the bleak private murals we now call the Black Paintings. Here the mood is different but the freedom is the same. One smith holds the glowing metal with tongs, one bends over it, and the third swings a heavy hammer above his head, his back and arms built like a wrestler's. The whole thing is greys and blacks lit by one hot streak of red-orange iron. The picture stayed in the family after Goya died and passed through several owners before reaching New York.