Francisco Goya painted Saturn Devouring His Son between 1820 and 1823, a period when the artist was in his mid-seventies and living in a house outside Madrid called the Quinta del Sordo. The picture began as a mural on the plaster walls of that house and was later transferred to canvas; it now measures 143.5 cm high by 81.4 cm wide. It hangs today in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, where the dark, vertical image is shown as part of Goya's Black Paintings.
What the picture shows
A giant naked figure fills the tall, vertical canvas. His long, grey, wild hair is visible as he crouches against a black background. His eyes are wide open and bulging, and his open mouth bites into the upper part of a small human body at the shoulder. Both hands grip the body around the waist; the body hangs vertically below his fists. The head and one arm are missing, and red blood marks the torn flesh.
His knees are bent, one in the lower left and one in the lower right; the right knee is lit pale against the darkness. The edges of the figure dissolve into black, and the lower corners are almost black. The palette is limited to black, ochre, grey-brown, white, and red. The brushwork is loose and rough, with visible scraping and dabbing, and there is no setting or ground shown. A small mark or inventory number is faintly visible in the lower left corner.
When and why Goya painted Saturn Devouring His Son
When Goya made this painting, he was in his mid-seventies and living at the Quinta del Sordo, a house outside Madrid. He had already been deaf for decades and had lived through the Peninsular War and the political turmoil that followed in Spain. The work was not a public commission; Goya painted it directly on the plaster walls of his house for himself. Saturn Devouring His Son belongs to the Black Paintings, a group of fourteen dark, private scenes executed between 1819 and 1823. These pictures connect to Romanticism through their raw emotion, violence, and focus on extreme states of mind. The dark palette and rough handling were far from the court portraits that had made Goya famous.
Seeing it at home
In a hand-painted copy of Saturn Devouring His Son, keep the tall, narrow proportions of the original, 143.5 x 81.4 cm, or a scaled version of that ratio. Look for a dry, scraped surface rather than a smooth finish, and a palette limited to black, ochre, grey-brown, white, and red. The rough brushwork and the way the edges sink into darkness matter more than fine detail.