Nature morte aux bécasses

Goya painted this around 1808, the year French armies poured into Spain and the country fell into a brutal war of occupation. He was in his 60s, a court painter in Madrid, and in these years he made a series of still lifes of dead game and produce alongside the etchings we now call the Disasters of War. Two woodcocks lie limp against a dark ground, caught in a raking light. Scholars have long set these plucked, lifeless birds beside his war scenes and seen the same unflinching eye, though the still lifes may also have answered a plainer need, a record of food in years when food ran short.