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In the first part of his career Goya was much occupied with making designs for tapestries to decorate the walls of royal palaces. The cartoons for these tapestries, which now hang in the Prado, were of a rich variety of scenes, and in some of them we get glimpses of the satirical, somber, or sinister which anticipate the later Goya. However, the major impression is of light and color and pretty people in gracious poses. An elegant young woman sits in the shade of a parasol held by a handsome attendant. Spring is evoked by a profusion of flowers, graceful women, and a charming child. In Autumn a handsome man ceremoniously offers a bunch of grapes to a lovely woman while a small boy reaches eager hands toward them. A luminous atmosphere suffuses these scenes and the colors are clear and bright.
In his old age Goya painted decorations of quite a different sort on the walls of his own house. He was seventy-three and had been for a quarter of a century deaf, and he had just recovered from a serious illness. He had bought himself a house outside Madrid, which came to be known as the quinta del sordo, the house of the deaf man. On its walls he painted what we know as the pintas negras, the black paintings, so-called both because of the predominance of black in their composition and because of the somber nature of their subject matter. These paintings express and evoke the nighttime side of the the human soul with a haunting and terrifying power. Writers have struggled for words to convey the profoundly disturbing effect of these works: 'the sublime yet monstrous phantasmagoria … the weirdest, most mysterious known to art' (8, p. 114). These paintings, also now in the Prado, present a startling contrast to Goya's earlier works.
I shall be occupied here with those of the black paintings