Le Ballon

A great dark balloon hangs over a crowd who crane up at it from a shadowed valley. Goya painted this around 1812, in the middle of the Peninsular War that was tearing Spain apart, the same years that produced his savage prints of wartime atrocity. Balloons had been a marvel since the Montgolfier brothers first sent one up in 1783, and Spanish crowds had gathered for public ascents. Here, though, the machine floats free of any clear occasion, more apparition than news report. Nobody is sure exactly what he meant by it, and Goya left no explanation. The canvas stayed in his family after his death and eventually reached the museum at Agen in southwest France, bequeathed by a French diplomat in 1899.