Plate 55 from "Los Caprichos": Until death (Hasta la muerte)

Plate 55 from "Los Caprichos": Until death (Hasta la muerte)

Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The figure at the center has been variously identified as a vain woman getting ready to celebrate her seventy-fifth birthday or a representation of death itself. She sits at the mirror in her boudoir, trying on a new headpiece, while her maid and two young men—possibly her professed admirers—conceal their sneering. The image shares the tone and concerns of the social satires that appear earlier in the series. Its position might be explained by the old woman’s physical appearance; the artist often used features meant to be read as grotesque to imply moral conditions. The mild caricatures of the first part of the Caprichos yield in the second part to witches, monsters, and barely human clerics.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Plate 55 from "Los Caprichos": Until death (Hasta la muerte)Plate 55 from "Los Caprichos": Until death (Hasta la muerte)Plate 55 from "Los Caprichos": Until death (Hasta la muerte)Plate 55 from "Los Caprichos": Until death (Hasta la muerte)Plate 55 from "Los Caprichos": Until death (Hasta la muerte)

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.