Merry Folly, from Disparates, published as plate 12 in Los Proverbios
1816–19, published 1864
Medium
Etching, burnished aquatint, and drypoint in brown-black on ivory wove paper
Dimensions
Image: 21.4 × 32.4 cm (8 7/16 × 12 13/16 in.); Plate: 24.4 × 35.3 cm (9 5/8 × 13 15/16 in.); Sheet: 33.1 × 49.7 cm (13 1/16 × 19 5/8 in.)
Classification
etching
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
44902
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
In his early 70s Goya made a series of enigmatic prints whose titles and imagery have long been the subject of debate. Printed four decades after the artist’s death, the Spanish Royal Academy of Fine Arts devised the title Los Proverbios (Proverbs) in an attempt to assign a theme to the group. A handful of early trial proofs were later discovered on which the artist had inscribed Disparate, which roughly translates as folly, nonsense, absurdity, or fantasy. As he aged Goya began to depict elder...
About the Artist
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes · 1746–1828
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was born on March 30, 1746, in the small Aragonese village of Fuendetodos, Spain, to José Benito de Goya, a master gilder, and Gracia de Lucientes. The fourth of six children in a modest lower-middle-class family, Goya received a basic education before beginning his artistic training at age 14 under the local painter José Luzán y Martínez in Zaragoza, where he sp...