The Dog (Goya)
Encyclopedia
The Dog is the name usually given to a painting by Spanish artist Francisco Goya
, now in the Museo del Prado
, Madrid
. It shows the head of a small black dog gazing upwards. The dog itself is almost lost in the vastness of the rest of the image, which is empty except for a dark sloping area near the bottom of the picture: an unidentifiable mass which conceals the animal's body.
The Dog is one of the Black Paintings
Goya painted directly onto the walls of his house sometime between 1819 and 1823. He did not intend the paintings for public exhibition (they were not removed from the house until 50 years after Goya had left), so it is unlikely that he gave them titles.
Antonio Saura
called The Dog "the world's most beautiful picture".
, Goya produced a series of 14 works, which he painted with oils
directly onto the walls of the house. At the age of 73, and having survived two life-threatening illnesses, Goya was likely to have been concerned with his own mortality, and was increasingly embittered by the conflicts
that had engulfed the Spain in the decade preceding his move to the Quinta del Sordo, and the developing civil strife–indeed, Goya was completing the plates that formed his series The Disasters of War
during this period. Although he initially decorated the rooms of the house with more inspiring images, in time he overpainted all of them with the intense haunting pictures known today as the Black Paintings. Uncommissioned and never meant for public display, these pictures reflect his darkening mood, with their depictions of intense scenes of malevolence, conflict and despair.
If Goya gave titles to the works he produced at the Quinta del Sordo he never revealed what they were; the names by which they are now known were assigned by others after his death, and this painting is often identified by variations on the common title: A Dog, Head of a Dog, The Buried Dog, The Half-Drowned Dog, The Half-Submerged Dog; more colloquially as "Goya's Dog"; or by the Spanish
names or .
The enigmatic depiction of the dog has led to myriad interpretations of Goya's intentions. The painting is often seen a symbolic depiction of man's futile struggle against malevolent forces; the black sloping mass which envelopes the dog is imagined to be quicksand, earth or some other material in which the dog has become buried. Having struggled unsuccessfully to free itself, it can now do nothing but look skywards hoping for a divine intervention that will never come. The vast swathe of "sky" which makes up the bulk of the picture intensifies the feeling of the dog's isolation and the hopelessness of its situation. Others see the dog as cautiously raising its head above the black mass, afraid of something outside the of the painting's field of view, or perhaps an image of abandonment, loneliness and neglect. Robert Hughes says "We do not know what it means, but its pathos moves us on a level below narrative."
's The Monk by the Sea
painted around 1808–1809 is on a similar theme: a tiny figure dwarfed by a featureless landscape, but Goya's work goes further in breaking with traditional composition. While Friedrich's subject is dwarfed by its surroundings – the monk takes up an even smaller proportion of the canvas than Goya's dog – the landscape is recognisable as a landscape and the lines conventional. Goya's influence is apparent in the dog in Pierre Bonnard
's 1910 The Red-Checkered Tablecloth.
of the Museo del Prado.
After showing them at the Exposition Universelle
of 1878 in Paris, d'Erlanger eventually donated them to the Spanish state. The effects of time on the murals, coupled with the inevitable damage caused by the delicate operation of mounting the crumbling plaster on canvas, meant that most of the murals required restoration work and some detail may have been lost. The Dog appears not to have suffered too badly, though the faint dark shape in the upper right of the picture is sometimes considered to be damage. The Dog was on the second floor of the Quinta del Sordo, and in disputes over the provenance of the Black Paintings exchanges have focused on whether the villa possessed a second floor at the time of Goya's residence.
thought The Dog "the world's most beautiful picture" , and his contemporary, Rafael Canogar referred to it as a "visual poem" and cited it as the first Symbolist
painting of the Western world. Picasso
was a great admirer of the Black Paintings (though he did not single out the The Dog in particular), and Joan Miro
requested to see two paintings on his final visit to the Prado: The Dog and Velázquez
's Las Meninas
, which he held in equal regard. Manuela Mena, curator at the Prado, claimed: "There is not a single contemporary painter in the world that does not pray in front of The Dog".
Francisco Goya
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns. Goya was a court painter to the Spanish Crown, and through his works was both a commentator on and chronicler of his era...
, now in the Museo del Prado
Museo del Prado
The Museo del Prado is the main Spanish national art museum, located in central Madrid. It features one of the world's finest collections of European art, from the 12th century to the early 19th century, based on the former Spanish Royal Collection, and unquestionably the best single collection of...
, Madrid
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
. It shows the head of a small black dog gazing upwards. The dog itself is almost lost in the vastness of the rest of the image, which is empty except for a dark sloping area near the bottom of the picture: an unidentifiable mass which conceals the animal's body.
The Dog is one of the Black Paintings
Black Paintings
The Black Paintings is the name given to a group of paintings by Francisco Goya from the later years of his life, likely between 1819–1823. They portray intense, haunting themes, reflective of both his fear of insanity and by then, his bleak outlook on humanity...
Goya painted directly onto the walls of his house sometime between 1819 and 1823. He did not intend the paintings for public exhibition (they were not removed from the house until 50 years after Goya had left), so it is unlikely that he gave them titles.
Antonio Saura
Antonio Saura
Antonio Saura was a Spanish artist and writer, one of the major post-war painters to emerge in Spain in the fifties whose work has marked several generations of artists and whose critical voice is often remembered.-Biography:He began painting and writing in 1947 in Madrid while suffering from...
called The Dog "the world's most beautiful picture".
Background
In 1819, Goya purchased a house named "Quinta del Sordo" ("Villa of the Deaf Man") on the banks of the Manzanares near Madrid. It was a small two-story house which was named after a previous occupant who had been deaf, though Goya also happened to be functionally deaf, as a result of an illness he had contracted in 1792. Between 1819 and 1823, when he moved to BordeauxBordeaux
Bordeaux is a port city on the Garonne River in the Gironde department in southwestern France.The Bordeaux-Arcachon-Libourne metropolitan area, has a population of 1,010,000 and constitutes the sixth-largest urban area in France. It is the capital of the Aquitaine region, as well as the prefecture...
, Goya produced a series of 14 works, which he painted with oils
Oil painting
Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments that are bound with a medium of drying oil—especially in early modern Europe, linseed oil. Often an oil such as linseed was boiled with a resin such as pine resin or even frankincense; these were called 'varnishes' and were prized for their body...
directly onto the walls of the house. At the age of 73, and having survived two life-threatening illnesses, Goya was likely to have been concerned with his own mortality, and was increasingly embittered by the conflicts
Peninsular War
The Peninsular War was a war between France and the allied powers of Spain, the United Kingdom, and Portugal for control of the Iberian Peninsula during the Napoleonic Wars. The war began when French and Spanish armies crossed Spain and invaded Portugal in 1807. Then, in 1808, France turned on its...
that had engulfed the Spain in the decade preceding his move to the Quinta del Sordo, and the developing civil strife–indeed, Goya was completing the plates that formed his series The Disasters of War
The Disasters of War
The Disasters of War are a series of 8280 prints in the first published edition , for which the last two plates were not available. See "Execution". prints created between 1810 and 1820 by the Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco Goya...
during this period. Although he initially decorated the rooms of the house with more inspiring images, in time he overpainted all of them with the intense haunting pictures known today as the Black Paintings. Uncommissioned and never meant for public display, these pictures reflect his darkening mood, with their depictions of intense scenes of malevolence, conflict and despair.
If Goya gave titles to the works he produced at the Quinta del Sordo he never revealed what they were; the names by which they are now known were assigned by others after his death, and this painting is often identified by variations on the common title: A Dog, Head of a Dog, The Buried Dog, The Half-Drowned Dog, The Half-Submerged Dog; more colloquially as "Goya's Dog"; or by the Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
names or .
Painting
The painting is divided into two unequal sections: an upper, dirty ochre "sky" and a smaller sloping curved dark brown section which fades to black as it slopes up to the right. Over the top of this lower section the dog's head can be seen, it snout lifted, its ears pulled back and its eyes looking up and towards the right. A faint dark shape looms over the dog; this is sometimes considered to be damage or an intentional inclusion, but is generally seen as an artefact from the earlier painting that decorated the wall before Goya overpainted it with The Dog.The enigmatic depiction of the dog has led to myriad interpretations of Goya's intentions. The painting is often seen a symbolic depiction of man's futile struggle against malevolent forces; the black sloping mass which envelopes the dog is imagined to be quicksand, earth or some other material in which the dog has become buried. Having struggled unsuccessfully to free itself, it can now do nothing but look skywards hoping for a divine intervention that will never come. The vast swathe of "sky" which makes up the bulk of the picture intensifies the feeling of the dog's isolation and the hopelessness of its situation. Others see the dog as cautiously raising its head above the black mass, afraid of something outside the of the painting's field of view, or perhaps an image of abandonment, loneliness and neglect. Robert Hughes says "We do not know what it means, but its pathos moves us on a level below narrative."
Influence
Caspar David FriedrichCaspar David Friedrich
Caspar David Friedrich was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning...
's The Monk by the Sea
The Monk by the Sea
The Monk by the Sea is an oil painting by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. It was painted between 1808 and 1810 in Dresden and was first shown together with the painting The Abbey in the Oakwood in the Berlin Academy exhibition of 1810...
painted around 1808–1809 is on a similar theme: a tiny figure dwarfed by a featureless landscape, but Goya's work goes further in breaking with traditional composition. While Friedrich's subject is dwarfed by its surroundings – the monk takes up an even smaller proportion of the canvas than Goya's dog – the landscape is recognisable as a landscape and the lines conventional. Goya's influence is apparent in the dog in Pierre Bonnard
Pierre Bonnard
Pierre Bonnard was a French painter and printmaker, as well as a founding member of Les Nabis.-Biography:...
's 1910 The Red-Checkered Tablecloth.
Transfer from the Quinta del Sordo
Although never meant to be seen by the public, the paintings were obviously important works in Goya's oeuvre. When Goya went into self-imposed exile in France in 1823, he passed the Quinta del Sordo to his grandson, Mariano. After various changes of ownership, the house came into the possession of the Belgian banker Baron Emile d'Erlanger in 1874. After 70 years on the walls of the Quinta del Sordo, the murals were deteriorating badly and, in order to preserve them, the new owner of the house had them transferred to canvas under the direction of Salvador Martínez Cubell, the curatorCurator
A curator is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material...
of the Museo del Prado.
After showing them at the Exposition Universelle
Exposition Universelle (1878)
The third Paris World's Fair, called an Exposition Universelle in French, was held from 1 May through to 10 November 1878. It celebrated the recovery of France after the 1870 Franco-Prussian War.-Construction:...
of 1878 in Paris, d'Erlanger eventually donated them to the Spanish state. The effects of time on the murals, coupled with the inevitable damage caused by the delicate operation of mounting the crumbling plaster on canvas, meant that most of the murals required restoration work and some detail may have been lost. The Dog appears not to have suffered too badly, though the faint dark shape in the upper right of the picture is sometimes considered to be damage. The Dog was on the second floor of the Quinta del Sordo, and in disputes over the provenance of the Black Paintings exchanges have focused on whether the villa possessed a second floor at the time of Goya's residence.
Reception
Goya was long dead by the time the paintings were first exhibited publicly. Spanish painter Antonio SauraAntonio Saura
Antonio Saura was a Spanish artist and writer, one of the major post-war painters to emerge in Spain in the fifties whose work has marked several generations of artists and whose critical voice is often remembered.-Biography:He began painting and writing in 1947 in Madrid while suffering from...
thought The Dog "the world's most beautiful picture" , and his contemporary, Rafael Canogar referred to it as a "visual poem" and cited it as the first Symbolist
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
painting of the Western world. Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
was a great admirer of the Black Paintings (though he did not single out the The Dog in particular), and Joan Miro
Joan Miró
Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona.Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride...
requested to see two paintings on his final visit to the Prado: The Dog and Velázquez
Diego Velázquez
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez was a Spanish painter who was the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV. He was an individualistic artist of the contemporary Baroque period, important as a portrait artist...
's Las Meninas
Las Meninas
Las Meninas is a 1656 painting by Diego Velázquez, the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age, in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. The work's complex and enigmatic composition raises questions about reality and illusion, and creates an uncertain relationship between the viewer and the figures...
, which he held in equal regard. Manuela Mena, curator at the Prado, claimed: "There is not a single contemporary painter in the world that does not pray in front of The Dog".