The beds of death
1812 - 1814. Wash, Burin, Burnisher, Drypoint, Etching on wove paper.Not on display
If death has been explicit and omnipresent over the course of the numerous Hunger prints, its name has not appeared in their titles until now. This work may be one of the most expressive of all, as well as one of the most meditative. Goya’s ideas for this composition were clear from the beginning, and the scant differences between the preparatory drawing and the final print are due almost exclusively to the fact that they employ different graphic techniques: red chalk, for the former, and etching for the latter. The subject was not clear to the work’s earliest critics. In 1918, Beruete was the first to grasp the emotional content of this image, which he called an “impressive and tragic scene, admirably rendered, straightforward and steeped in emotion, which recalls those decisive moments of silence in which not a word is uttered, but everything is said” (Beruete 1916-18, III, p. 91). This scene has been related to the large number of bodies that built up in hospitals during the famine that struck the capital. There were not enough beds, so they lay on the hallway floors, covered with little more than blankets, awaiting their inevitable deaths. Here, Goya presents a woman almost entirely covered by a blanket that stops just above the bottom of her skirt. She covers her face to avoid the sight and smell of such a horrendous situation. It matters very little whether the bodies lined up behind her are alive or not, as death is omnipresent. It has hovered around the previous prints, and will do so around the following ones, as well, and the title of this one makes that clear. Still, this image’s protagonist is alive and is trying to walk around the row of deathbeds, and to avoid their beckoning fate. The sense of transit is suggested by the slight diagonal established by the horizontally aligned bodies, and this marks the woman’s movement towards the foreground. Compositionally, Goya accentuates her solitude by darkening the background that emphasizes her verticality. Once again, Goya presents an image this is more than simply something he may have witnessed in Madrid in those years. By stripping it of any concrete reference to a specific location, he imbues it with a more transcendent significance, making it a universal image of man’s aloneness and anguish in the face of death. (Text from: Matilla, J.M.: Las Camas de la muerte, in: Goya en tiempos de Guerra, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2008, p. 332)
