Men Reading

Men Reading, painted around 1820 and held at the Museo del Prado, is another of Goya’s Black Paintings from the Quinta del Sordo. The scene shows a group of men gathered around a reader, their faces illuminated in the surrounding darkness with expressions ranging from attentiveness to horror. The painting may represent a clandestine political meeting, a reading of forbidden liberal texts, or simply the human desire for knowledge in times of oppression. The Black Paintings’ transfer from the walls of Goya’s house to canvas in the 1870s preserved these extraordinary works but necessarily altered their original relationship to the domestic spaces for which they were created.

Goya renders the reading group with his characteristic late technique of broad, summary brushstrokes emerging from darkness. The tight clustering of the figures and their intense expressions create an atmosphere of conspiratorial urgency.