Los Desastres de la Guerra (Delteil 120-199; Harris 121-200)

In 1808 Goya was requested to visit the besieged town of Saragossa by General José de Palafox, the officer in charge of the city defences who wanted the famous artist to witness the citizens' struggle and heroism. Conceived over a ten year period and based on his travels through the war-torn countryside and his subsequent flight before the advancing Napoleonic armies, Desastres de la Guerra is Goya's most dramatic and profoundly emotional graphic series. The eighty plates open a window onto a world ravaged by war, civil strife, reprisals and famine. As eyewitness accounts they dispel any romantic notions of the Age of Enlightenment, providing instead a portrayal of the anonymous, confused quality of war and mankind's capacity to inflict wanton cruelty on one another. The resonance of each image is enhanced by the artist's mastery of the etching technique, using great control to subtly build and balance contrasts with washes of aquatint and burnished highlights.

Hidden away for fear of financial failure and political reprisals, the copper plates for the series remained unpublished until the artist's son Javier gave them to the Real Academia in 1863. The plates had remained in good condition but even during the printing of the first edition they began to deteriorate (to such an extent that they were probably steel-faced before the second edition was printed). There is therefore a considerable difference in quality between early impressions, such as in the present lot, and later impressions, even within the first edition.