A romaria de San Isidro

Goya never meant anyone to see this. Around 1819 he was old, stone deaf and living alone in a house outside Madrid people called the Quinta del Sordo, the deaf man's house. On its plaster walls, in private, he painted 14 dark, bleak murals we now call the Black Paintings, and this is one of them. A ragged procession comes toward you out of the gloom, faces twisted, mouths open as if singing or howling, a religious pilgrimage that looks closer to a nightmare. There was no patron here, no commission, nothing to please. He was painting straight onto his own walls whatever was in his head. Decades after his death the murals were peeled off the plaster and moved onto canvas, which is how they reached the Prado.