They are getting drunk; folio 67 (recto) from the Madrid Album "B"

Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Three debauched women are shown drinking wine, while a fourth reaches for the bottle and, in a drunken gesture, brings her face close to the central figure, perhaps sharing a joke or aping intimacy. The drawing on the other side of the page (35.103.10) provided the basis for plate 33 of the Caprichos. The inscription announces its subject as deception, and the drawing shows a quack dentist pulling teeth. Quackery was such a problem in Madrid during the 1790s that measures were taken to weed out fake practitioners.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art