Plate 50 from "Los Caprichos": The Chinchillas (Los Chinchillas)
Medium
Etching, burnished aquatint, burin
Dimensions
Plate: 8 x 5 13/16 in. (20.3 x 14.8 cm) Sheet: 11 9/16 x 8 3/16 in. (29.4 x 20.8 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(50)
Tags
Art Historical Context
Francisco de Goya y Luc, one of Spain's greatest artists and a pivotal figure bridging the Enlightenment and Romanticism, created *Plate 50 from " Caprichos": Thechillas* in 1799. This print is part of his groundbreaking series of 80 etchings, published amid Spain's social and political upheavals, where Goya boldly satirized the follies, superstitions, and corruptions of late 18th-century society clergy and nobility to everyday vices. Housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Drawings and Prints department, it measures a intimate plate size of 8 x 5 13/16 inches, inviting close contemplation....
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 ...