Cruel tale of woe!

The miseries and disasters of war: the prints of Goya and Callot, 2010

Francisco Goya was Spain’s leading court painter when he created eighty prints entitled The Disasters of War. He made the series in response to the invasion of Spain by the French in 1808 and the bloody Peninsular War that followed. The six-year conflict between France, under Napoleon, and the alliance of Spain, Portugal and the United Kingdom devastated Spain and its population, a situation intensified by the famine of 1811 and 1812, which affected Madrid. Goya witnessed the atrocities committed by the French and Spanish troops firsthand and recorded the daily cruelty and violence of the war. 

In his prints Goya depicted in unflinching detail the corrosive, dehumanising effects of the conflict on all those affected by the war. Working over ten years, he portrayed the experience of war with an unprecedented directness, exploiting the qualities of etching and aquatint to create a new expressive language. Unlike Jacques Callot’s depictions of war, Goya’s compositions focused on the actions of small groups of people and placed the viewer in the heart of the carnage. The shocking imagery is magnified by Goya’s short and sometimes ambiguous titles, which build a harrowing narrative. Despite Goya’s deep pessimism about human nature, the series ends with a frail statement of hope.     

Titled Fatal consequences of Spain’s bloody war with Buonaparte. And other emphatic caprices, the series can be divided into three parts: the first represents scenes of war; the second, the impact of the famine in Madrid; and the third, caprices or fantasies. The last group of prints are allegorical and appear to allude to the repressive regime of Ferdinand VII which followed the war. Goya, fearing persecution from King Ferdinand VII, did not publish Disasters of War during his lifetime.

The Gallery owns a full set of Goya’s Disasters of War, from the First Edition, a selection of which is on display.

Maria Zagala, Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs