item details
Overview
Los caprichos are a set of 80 prints in aquatint and etching, created by the famous Spanish artist Francisco Goya in 1797 and 1798, and published as an album in 1799. The prints were an artistic experiment: a medium for Goya's condemnation of the universal follies and foolishness in the Spanish society in which he lived. The criticisms are far-ranging and acidic; he speaks against the predominance of superstition, the ignorance and inabilities of the various members of the ruling class, pedagogical shortcomings, marital mistakes and the decline of rationality. Some of the prints have anticlerical (anti-church) themes. Goya described the series as depicting "the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilised society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance or self-interest have made usual".
The work was an enlightened critique of late 18th-century Spain, and humanity in general. The informal style, as well as the depiction of contemporary society found in Caprichos, makes them (and Goya himself) a precursor to modernism almost a century later.
In this print, Plate 76 of the series, the cockade and baton of the short, fat, elderly officer in the centre make him think he is a superior being. He abuses the office entrustred to him to annoy everybody who knows him. He is proud, insolent and vain to all his social inferiors, and servile and abject to his superiors. Here he is surrounded by three 'inferiors' and is dispensing orders to them. The one on the far left who is crippled;and immediately behind the officer, another figure appears to be mocking him.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_caprichos
Francisco Goya, Los Caprichos (Mineola, 2012).
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art July 2017