Los Caprichos.

Madrid, Rafael Esteve (?) for the artist, 1799. . First edition, one of approximately 300 copies; quarter broadsheets (311 x 205mm); 80 plates on a single uniform stock of unwatermarked laid paper; etchings with burnished aquatint, many with drypoint and/or burin (fine impressions printed in sepia, printing with great contrasts and bright highlights, the aquatint just beginning to show a little wear on some plates, with the scratch on plate 45, with wide margins, some pale spotting mainly on the first few pages, otherwise in very good condition; black morocco binding by Lebrun, signed on the spine and dated Paris 1844 on the rear cover, tooled in gilt with the Self-Portrait of plate 1 and the name of the artist on the front cover, the motif and title of plate 32 on the back cover, marbled endpapers; within a matching red morocco box, with the name of the artist, the title and the name of the binder on the spine, the inside with a black and gilt morocco inlay showing all the tools used for the binding.
The complete set of eighty etchings with burnished aquatint, drypoint and engraving, 1797-1798, on laid paper. A very good set from the first edition, published by the artist in an edition of approximately three hundred copies. With Los Caprichos, Goya for the first time made his visions of the more sinister side of Spanish society – and the human soul in general – accessible to a wider audience, beyond his small group of friends and patrons. Goya was commercially ambitious, and set himself an enormous undertaking, prepared over several years and based on hundreds of drawings. Harris has estimated that he produced 300 sets (i.e. 24,000 impressions) of the Caprichos, making it at the time the largest series of prints ever conceived by a single artist. But the bitter reality was that perhaps only some thirty sets of this first and only lifetime edition were sold. In 1803, the artist gave the plates and the remaining impressions to the King, presumably to escape the wrath of the Inquisition.

A crushing failure at the time, in hindsight Los Caprichos is the pivotal work of Goya's entire oeuvre. In one grandiose, dark symphony he unleashes his unsparing satirical sense and his wild imagination, plate after plate, tied loosely together by related motifs and laconic, often mysterious titles. The only plate without an engraved title is perhaps the most famous of all: the artist, overcome by sleep, with his head resting on a table, is surrounded by creatures of the night: owls, bats, a cat and a lynx. On the front of the table the following words appear vaguely out of the aquatint surface: El sueño de la razon produce monstruos. The phrase is ultimately untranslatable, as sueño can mean both 'sleep' and 'dream'. This ambiguity – does Reason dream up monsters or do monsters arise as Reason sleeps? – is characteristic of the entire series. Having first conceived it as the title page, Goya changed his mind and placed it as plate 43 right in the middle of the series, dividing the series roughly into two parts. The first part is largely devoted to satires of courtship and prostitution, mocking the vanities and pretensions of the young and old. It is in the nightmarish second part that the monsters arise, witches and demons fly, and goblins awake. Beyond the mere evocation and critique of superstition and witchcraft, the precise meaning of these later plates is even more cryptic. Concealed through visual puns, word play and allusions to proverbs, they often ridicule the idle and ruling classes, the clerics and the nobility.

Wickedly satirical and subversive as the Caprichos are in their imagery and content, they also represent a technical revolution. Having previously created a number of competent yet ultimately conventional etchings after Velazquez, Goya in this series suddenly and completely mastered the aquatint method. In particular through his use of blank paper for glowing highlights among dense shades of grey and black, he created images of dramatic and disturbing beauty. What makes Los Caprichos one of the greatest unified series of images ever produced, is not just his extraordinary draughtsmanship or his technical mastery, nor his sharp satirical wit, but the intensity of his imagination and the depth of his humanity.