Manufacture of bullets in the Sierra de Tardienta

When Napoleon's armies invaded Spain in 1808 and a guerrilla war erupted across the peninsula, Goya became the war's most unflinching artistic witness. Manufacture of Bullets in the Sierra de Tardienta is one of a group of small oil panels he painted around 1810-1814 documenting the resistance effort — Spanish peasants and irregulars improvising the tools of war in the mountains. Where official painting depicted war as heroic spectacle, Goya's panels record the grim, unglamorous labor of survival: women and men hunched over gunpowder and lead in makeshift workshops. The Sierra de Tardienta lies in Aragon, Goya's home region, lending these images an autobiographical intimacy. They complement the Disasters of War prints he began engraving at the same period, together constituting the most unsparing documentary of war ever produced by a European artist. The small wood support suggests these were private meditations rather than works intended for exhibition or sale.

Goya renders the makeshift arms production with characteristic intensity and dark atmospheric tones, using the mountain setting and concentrated activity to create an image of determined resistance.