Goya and the Witches: from the Osuna Sabbath to the Black Paintings

The he-goat, the Caprichos and the Quinta del Sordo: how Goya moved from Enlightenment satire on witchcraft to the tragic visions of the Black Paintings.

Francisco de Goya painted witches at two very distant moments of his life. In the 1790s, an established court painter, he depicted them for the enlightened aristocracy with biting irony. Between 1819 and 1823, old, deaf and isolated, he brought them back onto the walls of his own house in dark and hallucinatory forms. The two series tell the same theme in opposite spirits and show how profoundly his view of the world had changed.

The Sabbath for the Dukes of Osuna

Between 1797 and 1798 Goya painted six small pictures on the theme of witchcraft for the Duke and Duchess of Osuna, who intended them for their country residence near Madrid, the estate known as El Capricho. The most famous, Witches' Sabbath, now in the Museo Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid, shows a large black he-goat crowned with leaves, seated under a pale moon, surrounded by women offering him children. Bats fly in the sky.

The dukes, and especially the Duchess María Josefa Pimentel, frequented Enlightenment intellectuals and knew the sceptical literature on witchcraft. In that context Goya's scenes were not images of fear but satires against superstition and against the trials the Inquisition had conducted for centuries. The he-goat, the traditional figure of the devil at the sabbath, looks almost theatrical, like a mask behind which credulity hides.

From the Caprichos to the Quinta del Sordo

In 1799 Goya published the Caprichos, eighty etchings in which witches, goblins and demons serve to denounce ignorance, bad customs and the abuses of power. The most famous plate bears the inscription «The sleep of reason produces monsters» and shows the artist asleep while owls and bats rise behind him. Other prints portray witches flying on broomsticks or gathered at their nocturnal meetings.

In 1819 the painter bought a country house on the bank of the Manzanares, called the Quinta del Sordo after the nickname of a previous owner who was also deaf. On the walls of two rooms he painted in oil fourteen scenes that were not intended for the public and to which he never gave titles. These are the so-called Black Paintings, named for their dark tones dominated by blacks, ochres and greys.

The Great He-Goat and the lost crowd

In one of the rooms Goya again depicted a sabbath, now known as The Great He-Goat: a crowd of deformed figures with gaping mouths listens in a semicircle to a he-goat seen from behind, while a young woman sits apart with her hands in a muff. The same house contained Saturn Devouring His Son, Two Old Men Eating Soup, The Pilgrimage to San Isidro and The Fates.

Here satire gives way to a tragic vision. The witches are no longer targets of Enlightenment irony but images of a lost crowd and of a world in which reason seems to have lost all power. Many scholars link this shift to the painter's illness, to the devastation of the war against Napoleon and to the absolutist restoration of Ferdinand VII, which in 1824 led Goya to move to Bordeaux.

After the artist's death the paintings remained on the walls until, between 1874 and 1878, they were removed and transferred to canvas on the initiative of Baron Émile d'Erlanger, who later donated them to the Spanish state. Today they are in the Prado, while the small Osuna sabbath is in the Lázaro Galdiano: a few kilometres apart, the two works show how the same subject can move from social criticism to the deepest disquiet.