Plate 3 from "Los Caprichos": Here comes the bogey-man (Que viene el Coco)

Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This scene of a mother staring at a shrouded figure while her two terrified children cling to her hasbeen interpreted as Goya’s criticism of a repressive educational system based on fear of supernatural beings. Although a concern with poor education pervades the Caprichos, Goya’s specific target here is the women traditionally responsible for passing beliefs from one generation to the next. Implicating women in their children’s ignorance and superstition, the print alludes to the bogeyman—who wears fashionably pointy shoes beneath his robe—as the mother’s illicit lover. That reading would explain the contrasting expressions of the mother and her children.

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