Deux vieillards

Goya bought a country house outside Madrid in 1819, already in his seventies and long since deaf. On its walls, in private and for no buyer, he painted 14 dark scenes now called the Black Paintings, and this is one of them. An old bearded man leans on a staff while a second figure, his face half animal and half corpse, leans in close and seems to be shrieking into his ear. Some read that gesture as a bitter joke about Goya's own deafness, others as death or madness at the old man's shoulder. He painted straight onto the plaster, and only decades later were the images lifted onto canvas and moved to the Prado, where they hang in a room of their own.