Se aprovechan, plate 16 from: Los Desastres de la Guerra

The early trial proofs of Los Desastres are the only record of how Goya himself had intended these etchings to look. By the time this now famous series of prints, depicting the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars and subsequent the famine and brutal repression, could be published, Goya was long dead. In the meantime, tastes had changed and the printers of the first edition of 1863 decided to pull them with considerable plate tone, which darkened but also obscured and mellowed the gruesome scenes. Goya's own proofs, by contrast, have a starkness and immediacy which seems more akin to reportage than to artistic interpretation, and makes them all the more disturbing. This supposed veracity is of course an illusion - although Goya had witnessed such events - as each image is carefully composed. The present plate is remarkable for the gentle modelling of the dead bodies with minute dots and subtle shading, depicting them with an almost erotic tenderness that speaks of his empathy for dead and stands in sharp contrast to the violence and cruelty they have endured.

Tomas Harris only knew of two examples of this state, one in Madrid (Biblioteca Nacional) and one in New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art). Another proof, of Harris's state II.2., was sold at Christie's, New York, on 28 January 2014 (lot 14; $106,000).