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Lot Essay
This drawing was part of the Black Border Album, also called Album E. According to Eleanor Sayre, the album was originally composed of loose pages that the artist put together as a book, E. Sayre, 'An Old Man writing', The Bulletin of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1964, pp. 131-2. Some of the drawings have a single or double line framing the composition, probably done by the artist to show that the drawings should be treated as finished works of art. After Goya's death, his son and legatee, Javier Goya took the albums apart, renumbered the sheets and pasted them on sheets of pink paper. There are still some small fragments of pink paper stuck to the verso of this sheet.
This drawing belongs to a series of eleven unnumbered sheets, identified by Gassier missing sheets from the Black Border Album, op. cit., 1973, p. 165, nos. E.a-E.j. The Paris sale of 1877 included 105 sheets, divided in four groups. In that sale, the subjects were listed according to Goya's own titles, as well as the auctioneers' transcriptions and interpretations of each subject's meaning. Thus Gassier was first led to identify this work with 'Do those who escape work end up like this', P. Gassier and J. Wilson, op. cit., no. 1428. Later he published it under the title 'La Bouillie', explaining that the drawing with the former title, part of the 1877 sale as lot 10, was that in the Doria sale on 8 May 1899 and thus could not correspond with the present drawing.
Gassier related the subject to the cruel famine that hit Madrid in the winter of 1811-12, which Goya illustrated in plates 48 to 64 of his series of prints Los Desastres de la Guerra, particularly plates 51 and 59: 'Thanks to the millet' and 'Of what use is one cup'.
This drawing belongs to a series of eleven unnumbered sheets, identified by Gassier missing sheets from the Black Border Album, op. cit., 1973, p. 165, nos. E.a-E.j. The Paris sale of 1877 included 105 sheets, divided in four groups. In that sale, the subjects were listed according to Goya's own titles, as well as the auctioneers' transcriptions and interpretations of each subject's meaning. Thus Gassier was first led to identify this work with 'Do those who escape work end up like this', P. Gassier and J. Wilson, op. cit., no. 1428. Later he published it under the title 'La Bouillie', explaining that the drawing with the former title, part of the 1877 sale as lot 10, was that in the Doria sale on 8 May 1899 and thus could not correspond with the present drawing.
Gassier related the subject to the cruel famine that hit Madrid in the winter of 1811-12, which Goya illustrated in plates 48 to 64 of his series of prints Los Desastres de la Guerra, particularly plates 51 and 59: 'Thanks to the millet' and 'Of what use is one cup'.