Plate 14 from "The Disasters of War" (Los Desastres de la Guerra): 'It's a Hard Step!' (Duro es el paso!)
Medium
Etching, drypoint, burin (working proof)
Dimensions
Plate: 5 9/16 × 6 9/16 in. (14.2 × 16.6 cm) Sheet: 8 11/16 × 12 11/16 in. (22 × 32.2 cm)
Classification
Prints
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1932
Accession Number
32.62.16
Tags
Art Historical Context
Francisco de Goya y Luc, a pioneering Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, *Plate 14: 'It's a Hard Step (Duro es el!)* around 1810 as part of his seminal series *The Disasters of War*Los Desastres de la*). This powerful etching captures raw human suffering during the Peninsular War (18081814), when Napoleon's invading French forces devastated Spain. Goya, witnessing the atrocities firsthand, used these 82 prints to document not just battles, but the famine, executions, and moral collapse that followed—making the series a stark anti-war testament that remained unpublished u...
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 ...