Plate 35 from "Los Caprichos": She fleeces him (Le descañona)
Medium
Etching, burnished aquatint
Dimensions
Plate: 8 7/16 in. × 6 in. (21.4 × 15.2 cm) Sheet: 11 5/8 x 8 1/4 in. (29.5 x 20.9 cm)
Classification
Prints
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Gift of M. Knoedler & Co., 1918
Accession Number
18.64(35)
Tags
Art Historical Context
**Plate 35 from *Los Caprichos*:She Fleeces Him (Le descañona)*** Francisco de Goya yientes, a pioneering Spanish artist of the late Enlightenment, created this etching in 1799 as part of his groundbreaking series *Los Caprich*. Published amid Spain's social and political turmoil, the 80-print suite satirized the follies of 18th-century society—including superstition, corruption, and human vice—through dark, imaginative imagery. This plate depicts a woman gleefully plucking feathers from a hapless man, symbolizing exploitation, perhaps by a cunning prostitute or fortune-hunter "fleecing" he...
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 ...