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The Dog
Francisco Goya · Romanticism & Landscape
- Artist
- Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828)
- Date
- c. 1819–1823
- Dimensions
- 131 x 79 cm
- Medium
- Mixed technique on plaster, transferred to canvas
- Location
- Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain
The Dog, one of Goya's 'Black Paintings', shows only the head of a small dog peering up from behind a dark slope, beneath a vast, empty expanse of ochre and brown that fills almost the whole picture.
A closer look
Nothing else is shown: no owner, no landscape, no explanation. The dog seems to be sinking into quicksand or hiding, looking upwards at something we cannot see, perhaps with hope, perhaps with fear. The enormous empty space above creates a powerful sense of loneliness and helplessness. Goya painted it directly on the walls of his house outside Madrid, the 'Quinta del Sordo', in his old age, deaf and disillusioned. The image has been called the first modern painting, anticipating the abstraction and existential mood of 20th-century art.
More by Francisco Goya
In this gallery
The Third of May 1808
Saturn Devouring His Son
The Parasol
The Nude Maja
Charles IV of Spain and His Family
The Clothed Maja