The Disasters of War

The Disasters of War is a sequence of 82 prints of etching, aquatint and drypoint by Francisco de Goya executed between 1810 and 1820 that documents the violence surrounding the Peninsular War and its aftermath. Conceived during the occupation of Spain by Napoleon Bonaparte and completed amid the turmoil of the restored reign of Ferdinand VII of Spain, the series remained unpublished until decades after Goya's death and has become a central work in studies of Romanticism, conflict representation and print culture. The plates link Goya's practice to later visual responses to war crimes, repression and political upheaval across Europe and the Americas.

Background and Creation

Goya produced the series during a period that connected the sieges of Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz and the guerrilla warfare in Castile with the broader ambitions of Napoleon Bonaparte and the geopolitical reconfigurations after the Treaty of Fontainebleau (1807). Working in Madrid and later in exile at Bordeaux, Goya drew on direct reports from the Dos de Mayo Uprising, eyewitness accounts of the French invasion of Spain (1808), and personal experience under the absolutist policies of Ferdinand VII of Spain. Influences and correspondences can be traced to earlier printmakers such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Jacques Callot and Albrecht Dürer as well as contemporaries in the visual and literary cultures of Romanticism including Victor Hugo, William Wordsworth and Lord Byron. The technical choices—etching, aquatint, drypoint—reflect affinities with the print trade in Paris and the workshop practices of Aubert Frères and collectors like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Description and Themes

The series presents unflinching depictions of executions, mutilations, famine, rape, and torture amid the collapse of institutions associated with Bourbon rule and Napoleonic authority. Goya employs chiaroscuro, negative space and grotesque physiognomy to link scenes of battlefield slaughter to scenes of domestic brutality in Toledo and provincial towns of Aragon and Extremadura. Themes include the futility of armed conflict exemplified by images associated with the Siege of Zaragoza, the commodification of corpses evoked in plates resonant with the iconography of Spanish Inquisition abuses, and the moral ambiguity of resistance as debated in pamphlets from Juan Antonio Llorente and manifestos circulated in Seville. The prints conversely engage with allegorical traditions from Pieter Bruegel the Elder and the moralizing histories of Poussin, while anticipating modernist inquiries by Édouard Manet, Pablo Picasso and Otto Dix into the representation of atrocity.

Individual Prints and Series Structure

Goya organized the plates into thematic clusters that progress from scenes of occupation and rebellion to images of famine, domestic violence and grotesque allegory. Notable plates, often cited in scholarship, include depictions corresponding to events like the execution shootings after the Dos de Mayo Uprising and scenes suggestive of the aftermath of the Battle of Vitoria. The sequence numbering used by cataloguers—such as in the inventories by García López and the Prado scholars—allows cross-reference with states preserved at the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Each plate combines line work and aquatint tonalism to achieve a painterly effect that connects to Goya's earlier tapestry cartoons for the Royal Tapestry Factory and later works like the Black Paintings from his house at Quinta del Sordo. Collectively, the prints function as episodic testimonies that resist simple narrative closure, encouraging comparison with printed series such as Callot's Les Grandes Misères de la guerre and later photojournalistic sequences emerging from Crimean War reportage.

Reception and Influence

The prints were not published in Goya's lifetime; they circulated in impression sets and were first printed officially in Barcelona decades later, contributing to debates in 19th-century and 20th-century art history on realism, witness accounts and political commitment. Critics and historians—figures like Émile Zola, John Ruskin, Walter Benjamin and Georges Bataille—have invoked the series when discussing representation of violence, the ethics of depiction and the limits of empathy. The work influenced Édouard Manet, Gustave Courbet, Francisco Iturrino and later modernists including Pablo Picasso (notably resonant in Guernica) and expressionists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Otto Dix. Military historians and legal scholars contrast Goya's visual testimony with accounts by Napoleon Bonaparte's generals, diplomatic correspondence archived at Archivo General de Simancas and contemporary trials for war crimes that shaped concepts later codified in treaties such as the Hague Conventions.

Provenance and Editions

Surviving impressions of the series are dispersed among major institutions and private collections, with significant holdings at the Museo del Prado, Biblioteca Nacional de España, British Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Fogg Art Museum. Scholarly catalogues raisonnés by José Gudiol and the curatorial teams at the Prado established plate chronologies and variant states; conservation projects at the National Gallery of Art and restoration laboratories in Madrid and London have examined paper, watermark and inking to date impressions and trace paper stocks to mills supplying archives in Pamplona and Valladolid. Later commercial editions, hand-printed by printers in Paris and Madrid, circulated with varying numbers of states and were collected by patrons including Queen Isabella II of Spain, Charles X of France sympathizers and private collectors catalogued in auction records at Christie's and Sotheby's. The prints continue to be reproduced in critical editions, catalogues and museum displays that situate them within Goya's oeuvre and transnational histories of representation.

Category:Print series Category:Works by Francisco de Goya