Plate 13 from "The Disasters of War" (Los Desastres de la Guerra): 'Bitter to be Present' (Amarga presencia)
1810 (published 1863)
Medium
Etching, lavis, drypoint, burin and burnisher
Dimensions
Plate: 5 1/2 × 6 3/4 in. (13.9 × 17.1 cm) Sheet: 9 15/16 × 13 1/2 in. (25.2 × 34.3 cm)
Classification
Prints
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Purchase, Jacob H. Schiff Bequest, 1922
Accession Number
22.60.25(13)
Tags
Art Historical Context
**Plate 13: 'Bitter to be Present' Goya's *The Disasters of War Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, a master of Spanish Romanticism, created this haunting etching around 1810 amid the Peninsular War (1808–1814), Spain's brutal fight against Napoleon's invasion. Part of his seminal series *Los Desastres de la*—82 prints documenting war's atrocities—this plate captures the raw anguish of witnesses, likely men and women confronting horror, as suggested by its title *Amarga presencia*. Goya, then deaf and disillusioned, used these works to expose famine, violence, and human suffering without heroic ...
About the Artist
Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes) · 1746–1828
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) was a Spanish painter and printmaker considered the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns. Rising from modest provincial origins to become First Court Painter to Charles IV, Goya's career spanned the Enlightenment's optimism and the brutal Napoleonic invasion that shattered it. A mysterious illness in 1793 left him permanently deaf and ...