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05-03-2026
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes

Fuendetodos, Zaragoza (Spain), 1746 - Bordeaux (France), 1828

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes See author's file

The 2nd of May 1808 in Madrid or “The Fight against the Mamelukes”

1814. Oil on canvas.
Room 064

In the December of 1813, King Ferdinand VII’s return to Spain and his entry into Madrid were announced by the Treaty of Valençay, which that year ended the Peninsular War Fernando who had been a prisoner of Napoleon in France since his own abdication in 1808, the absent king commenced his return to Spain in February of 1814, his pledge to the 1812 Constitution being the condition of his restoration to the throne. His arrival in Madrid would coincide with the first commemoration of the uprising of the people of the city against the occupying French on the 2nd of May 1808. Between February and March 1814, the Regency Council –chaired by the infante Luis María de Borbón y Villabriga–, the Cortes, and the Madrid City Council began preparations for the ceremonial arrival of the king. The bibliography on The 2nd of May 1808 in Madrid or “The Fight against the Mamelukes” (P000748) and its companion painting, The 3rd of May 1808 in Madrid or “The Executions” (P000749), wrongfully considered that these pieces of art were painted so as to be exhibited in the streets of Madrid. In fact, neither the documents regarding the ceremony, nor the descriptions of the temporarily erected monuments and their allegorical ornamentation, mention the paintings by Goya. A number of invoices concerning the payments for the frames of these two paintings, have recently been located in the Royal General Archive These expenses were registered as ‘King’s Bedchamber’ in July and November 1814, thus implying that they were funded by the king for the Palace rooms, and that they were most certainly painted after May 1814. However, it was the Regency Council which commissioned the work in February, according to the documents from the Ministry of Governance and the minister, Juan Álvarez Guerra. On the 24th of May, Goya’s conditions to carry out the job were accepted. Allegedly, it was the minister himself who proposed Goya for these paintings, because of "the paramount importance of such a praiseworthy undertaking and the undisguised ability of the said professor to carry it out... that while the aforementioned Goya is employed in this work, the Treasury should remunerate him –in addition to what he has invested in canvases, priming, and colours according to his own accounts– the sum of one thousand and five hundred reales per month by way of compensation... so that such an illustrious and distinguished Professor does not lack the means of subsistence in his advanced age". On the 11th of May, two days before his arrival to Madrid, Ferdinand VII arrested the ministers of the government of the Regency, exiled the infante to Toledo and abolished the Constitution. The invoices for the manufacture of two frames for "the large pictures of paintings referring to the 2nd of May 1808" state that they were finished on 29 November 1814, the date from which they must have been hung in the Palace, although there is no record of this.

Goya painted only two canvases with reference to the episodes of the 2nd of May 1808, instead of the four often mentioned in the bibliography. This is evidenced in the invoices for the frames, since it was a commission by the Regency that was later maintained by the King following the regulatory procedure for Court Commissions. He proposed two topics as a diptych, visually complementary. Both have a joint meaning: the fierce cha of the people of Madrid against Murat’s troops during the morning of the Second of May, and the subsequent retaliation of the French army. In order to depict the first topic, Goya chose the street fight against French cavalry, for which he mainly portrayed the bravest and best-known elite troops: the Mamelukes of the Imperial Guard. There is also an Empress’s Dragoon and, among the dead, a grenadier of the Imperial Guard or a battle sailor. Regarding the Spanish combatants, the array of people who rose against the French is shown in the diversity of figures, dressed in the attires of different regions.

There have been plenty of locations proposed as the place where Goya sets the action: puerta del Sol, plaza de la Cebada, calle Mayor from the church of San Felipe, calle Carretas with the church of Buen Suceso and the Casa de Correos, calle Nueva with the Palace to the right and the cupola of the church of San Francisco el Grande to the left, or perhaps the viewpoint from the church of Buen Suceso to the Royal Palace, the bulk of which –with its distinguishing architecture crowned by the cupola of the chapel– would be the one dominating the left scene. This architectural motif seems to indicate that Goya placed the fight against the French in a place where the Royal Palace indeed dominates as a symbol of the Crown. On that day, the rebels were propelled by the Crown, which persevered as an ideal of return of the ‘Desired’ King throughout the war.

The restoration carried out between 2007 and 2008 has provided the painting with its original brightness and its spatial relationships lost in 1938, when a truck carrying the picture along with the “The 3rd of May 1808 in Madrid” and “The Executions” had an accident in Benicarló. In the first restoration, in 1941 –when the canvases came back to Madrid–, a red ink was used. In terms of colour, it was similar to the preliminary layer of the canvas that Goya used in order to fill out the gaps of the pictorial layer, which mainly affected the left part of the painting. This restoration –using old photographic documentation– has achieved the invisible reintegration of those colour gaps by returning its eveness, and thus the sense to the composition.

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Technical data

Imagen del carrusel
Imagen del carrusel
Inventory number
P000748
Author
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes
Title
The 2nd of May 1808 in Madrid or “The Fight against the Mamelukes”
Date
1814
Technique
Oil
Support
Canvas
Dimension
Width: 347.5 cm; Height: 268.5 cm
Series
Escenas de la Guerra de la Independencia, El Dos de Mayo de 1808 en Madrid, 1
Provenance
Royal Palace, Madrid, 1814; entered the Prado Museum before 1834, registered in the ‘Large Deposit’ in that year; seen in 1840 by Théophile Gautier in the rooms of the Museum; in 1850, by Count Clément de Ris; in 1867, it appears in the monograph on Goya by Charles Yriarte; it is finally registered in the catalogue of the Museum in 1872

Bibliography +

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Other inventories +

Museo Real de Pinturas a la muerte de Fernando VII, 1834. Núm. 177.
DEPÓSITO GRANDE ESCUELA ESPAÑOLA / Ciento setenta y siete. El compañero al anterior. La Revolución del día 2 de Mayo de 1808 / Yd. [d. Francisco Goya] / Lº / 8.900

Inv. Real Museo, 1857. Núm. 1848.

Catálogo Museo del Prado, 1872-1907. Núm. 734.

Catálogo Goya, Pierre Gassier y Juliet Wilson. Núm. 982.

Inscriptions +

Madrid/ Dos de Mayo
Front, upper left area

Exhibitions +

Reunited
Madrid
06.06.2020 - 25.07.2021

Goya in Times of War
Madrid
15.04.2008 - 13.07.2008

Location +

Room 064 (On Display)

Expuesto
Update date: 05-03-2026 | Registry created on 28-04-2015

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