Cour d'asile de fous

Goya made this small picture in 1794, painting on tinplate not much bigger than a book. He had just come through a terrible illness that left him permanently deaf, and cut off from ordinary conversation he turned inward, to what he called works of fancy and invention that a commission would never allow. Here he shows the courtyard of a madhouse, a bare vaulted space like a prison, where naked men wrestle and sprawl on the ground while a keeper stands over them with a whip. Goya said he had witnessed such a scene himself. It is among the first of the dark, private images of cruelty and madness that would occupy him for the rest of his life.