Scena di guerra

In May 1808 Napoleon's troops held Madrid, the city rose against them and was put down, and Spain went into six years of war and guerrilla fighting. Goya was 62 and still first painter to the Spanish crown. In those years he made two bodies of work that nobody had commissioned. One is the print series later called The Disasters of War. The other is a group of small panels of ambush, robbery and killing, painted for himself with no audience in view. This is one of them, which the museum dates to 1808 or the years just after. Another painting of the same scene hangs in Budapest, close enough that the two are usually compared side by side. The panel reached the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires in 1958.