12-12-2014 Botín Foundation and the Prado Museum will make the

La Fundación Botín y el Museo Nacional del Prado llevarán a cabo el catálogo razonado
de los dibujos de Goya
 Paloma Botín y Miguel Zugaza presentan el proyecto en la sede de la Fundación
Botín en Santander
 La investigación, que finalizará en 2019, incluirá cerca de 1.000 dibujos de Goya
de 40 prestigiosos museos de todo el mundo
 Paloma Botín and Miguel Zugaza present the project at the Botín
Foundation’s headquarters in Santander
 Research on the project, which will finalize in 2019, will include close to 1,000
drawings by Goya from 40 leading museum collections around the world.
 The study will be accompanied by two large-scale exhibitions, one at the
Botín Centre in 2016 and another at the Prado Museum in 2019.
Santander – 11 of December, 2014 – The Botín Foundation and the Prado Museum
will join forces on this ambitious project to research and make a catalogue raisonné of
drawings by Francisco de Goya which will take five years to complete and will
culminate in two large-scale temporary exhibitions. The first of these will be held at
the future Botín Centre in 2016 and will coincide with publication of the first volume.
The second will be held at the Prado Museum in the year 2019 when the remaining
volumes of the catalogue will be released, and in the year that commemorates the
second centenary of the Museum’s founding.
The importance of the drawings in the oeuvre of Goya (1746-1828) is comparable to
that of his paintings and etchings, both from a quantitative point of view –nearly a
thousand of his drawings have been preserved– and due the major role they played in
the formal and technical renewal of the art of drawing at the end of the 18th century.
Regarded as “Goya’s personal visual diary”, the drawing albums of this artist from
Saragossa reveal his inner universe and express his idiosyncratic worldview in the
manner of a visual account. These albums represent the painter’s most intimate works
and their contents are the most strikingly immediate, critical and insightful of his entire
oeuvre. In addition to these drawings, his preparatory sketches for etchings have been
preserved. These were the genesis of his graphic suites and the vehicle for conveying
his critical notions about the society of his day to a wider audience.
Both institutions are going to work jointly on an exhaustive research project which
encompasses the classification, study and restoration of the more than 520 drawings
by Goya belonging to the Prado Museum, and another 400 drawings by the artist
which are to be found in private collections and in forty international institutions,
including the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of
Fine Arts of Boston, the British Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York, The Musée du Louvre in Paris and the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, among
others.
As part of its programme to catalogue drawings by great masters of Spanish art, the
Botín Foundation will take on the general coordination and management of this
project, on which it will spend 1,700,000 euros, to fund the coordination and
publication work, as well as the organization, coordination and production of the
temporary exhibition in Santander.
For its part, the Prado Museum will be in charge of the scientific direction of the
research project, which will be led by José Manuel Matilla, Head of the Drawing and
Engravings Department and by Manuela Mena, Head of the Conservation Department
of 18th Century Painting and Goya, as well as the curator of the exhibitions to be held
at both venues. The undisputable novelty of the catalogue lies in the collaborative
approach to its execution, in which a team of specialists from the Prado Museum will
participate, together with external collaborators known for their contributions to the
study of Goya’s oeuvre.
This cataloguing study, which will begin in December 2014 and conclude in December
2019, will come to fruition with the publication of a five-volume catalogue raisonné in
Spanish which will include a thousand drawings by Goya. Accordingly, it will
immediately become an essential tool for research work and consultation about the
artist and about Spanish drawing. Prior to this, researchers and Goya aficionados had
to rely on the catalogue made by Pierre Gassier in 1973-75, whose information in the
light of today’s insights has been amply surpassed, notwithstanding the fact that it
remains an outstanding work for assisting Goya research.
Lastly, the research will be brought to the public by means of two large-scale
temporary exhibitions: the first of these will coincide with publication of the first
volume of the catalogue and will be held at the Botín Centre in 2016, for the most part
it will feature Goya’s drawings from the Prado Museum’s Collection. Subsequently, in
the year 2019, the Prado Museum will hold an exhibition in Madrid of drawings by the
artist from various international collections and museums.
In the opinion of Miguel Zugaza, Director of the Prado Museum, “One cannot
understand Goya and the complexity of his imagery without taking into account his
facet as a drawer. The Prado Museum has the most important collection of drawings
by the artist and, in addition, it contributes the expertise of two specialists in the
subject – Manuela Mena and José Manuel Matilla. From the Prado we are thrilled to
join the line of work launched by the Botín Foundation which studies and publishes
catalogues raisonnés of drawings by Spain’s foremost masters ".
According to Paloma Botín, “We are convinced that this agreement between our
institutions will represent a landmark for the Botín Foundation and will definitively
consolidate the line of work we set out on ten years ago, which sought more in-depth
study and promotion of drawing in Spanish art. The cataloguing of close to 1,000 of
Goya’s drawings will be a key reference work for future international study and insight
into the work of this great artist. It is painstaking and meticulous work which would be
an impossible undertaking without the collaboration of the Prado Museum’s experts”.
The Botín Foundation and its research into Spanish drawing
The Botín Foundation’s interest in Spanish drawing began in the year 2006 when it
launched a systematic line of research which sought more in-depth study and
promotion of the genre of drawing in Spanish art. Although drawing was regarded as
one of the most interesting and prolific genres –ranging from the great 16th century
Spanish masters to the present day– apart from a few museum folders and albums for
collectors, there was a lack of any in-depth, rigorous research projects.
The use of drawing, not just as an academic tool for preparation and trials for more
ambitious works in the genres of painting, sculpture, architecture and engraving, but
rather as an independent form of artistic expression, has come to epitomize the
creative personality of some the greatest artists of all time. However, its study and
knowledge is still hidden away in the folders and museum albums awaiting rigorous
study, classification and cataloguing in order to complete, discover and clarify many
facets of the creative side and full appreciation of their authors.
The Botín Foundation, under the expert guidance of Manuela Mena, a member of the
Visual Arts Advisory Committee at the Foundation, and additionally the Head of the
Conservation Department of 18th Century Painting and Goya, has published relevant
catalogues raisonnés devoted to some of the leading Spanish artists of the 18th and
19th centuries, namely Eduardo Rosales (1836-1873), Antonio del Castillo (1616-1668),
Pablo Gargallo (1881-1934), Alonso Cano (1601-1667), Mariano Salvador Maella (17391819) and José Gutiérrez Solana (1886-1945). Surveys of the drawings of Esteban
Murillo (1617-1682) and José de Madrazo (1781-1859) will be published in the near
future.
The strategic alliance between the Botín Foundation and the Prado Madrid with regard
to Goya’s drawings provides continuity for this relevant project and confers the genre
the prominence it deserves in the field of visual arts.
The Prado Museum and Goya’s drawings
The Prado Museum has always conferred Goya’s drawings a special place, and indeed
they are one of the fundamental pillars of its collection of drawings. Period
photographs taken at the beginning of last century show us how a good number of
them were displayed to the public in its rooms. Since the 1920’s a room was set aside
for them which, despite a few alterations over the years, remained like this until the
1980’s. Over time, these drawings were the subject of several publications, though
nobody ever undertook the task of making a catalogue raisonné of them. It was not
until the launching in September 2012 of the online microsite Goya in the Prado, that
all of the Aragonese master’s drawings in the Prado’s collection could be seen together
for the first time, accompanied by bibliographical and technical data, the result of
years of work, which represents the documentary groundwork on which the present
catalogue raisonné project is built.
Goya’s Albums of Drawings
Within Goya’s oeuvre taken as a whole, a special place should be reserved for his
works on paper in which, free of the pressures of commissions, he could express his
idiosyncratic worldview without restraint. The drawings in his albums and his etching
suites build a personal universe inhabited by all those things that fascinated the artist –
from private, daily experiences to the major upheavals and topics of his day. But while
in the etchings, due to being produced in large numbers, his aim was to convey ideas
to a broad audience, the album drawings constitute what we could describe as Goya’s
personal visual diary – they contained the artist’s inner universe and the things he saw
on the outside that caught his attention. Conceived for private viewing, these drawings
represent the painter’s most intimate work and they possess a peerless immediacy,
criticism and insightfulness.
Following his stay in 1796 in Sanlúcar de Barrameda together with the Duchess of Alba,
Goya became an untiring draughtsman, amassing eight albums of drawing until his
death in Bordeaux. Presenting a variety of material states, the albums reflect Goya’s
stylistic evolution as well as his concerns and interests, directly observing reality or
recreating it allegorically. The importance of these drawings in Goya’s oeuvre is
comparable to that of his paintings or his etchings, both from a quantitative point of
view –nearly a thousand of his drawings have been preserved– and due to the major
role they played in the formal and technical renewal of the art of drawing at the end of
the 18th century.
The first of his albums, known as the Sanlúcar Album or Album A, was executed in
1796 during the painter’s stay at the estate owned by the recently widowed Duchess
of Alba near where the Guadalquivir river joins the sea. In the album’s sheets, the
duchess and her lady companions can be seen portrayed in private – reclining, washing
or on walks– in highly sensual poses that foresee some of his subsequent drawings,
especially those contained in the Madrid Album or Album B and in his Caprichos. The
Prado Museum preserves three sheets of this album, with drawings on both sides of
the paper, of which a total of eight sheets are known to exist.
The second was the so-called Madrid Album or Album B, executed from 1796 to 1797,
begun during his convalescence in Cadiz and finished on his return to the capital of the
kingdom. Although the first drawings in the album relate directly to the feminine
sensuality to be found in the Sanlúcar Album, soon depictions of an undeniably
satirical tone begin to appear, with captions added beneath them. These works
possess the critical tone which would find its highest expression soon after in the
Caprichos, published in 1799. Both the etchings in the Caprichos suite and the majority
of the drawings contained in the Madrid Album are a satire devised as a means to
struggle against mankind’s vices and the absurd aspects of human behaviour. The
visual language of the Madrid and Sanlúcar albums is built with an acutely pictorial
awareness. The line is replaced by the daubing effects that characterize the watery
quality of Indian ink, whose greyish tone has more or less strength depending on how
much is used. Nearly a hundred drawings –five of which are in the Prado Museum’s
collection– are known to exist in this album, which were separated and scattered far
and wide – they are also drawn on both sides of the paper.
Album C is a fine example of the complexity of Goya’s work. The date of its execution,
though difficult to pinpoint, took place during the years of the War of Independence
(1808-1814) and the following years of King Fernando VII’s repression until the advent
of the Liberal Triennium (1820-1823). The album’s subject matter was influenced in
many aspects by these historical events: details of daily life, nightmarish visions in the
night, people condemned by the Inquisition, the cruelty of prisons, the assertion of
freedom after the proclamation in 1820 of the Constitution of Cadiz, a criticism of the
customs of monastic orders and a depiction of the life of friars who had been forcibly
secularized.
It is the album with most drawings and the only one that has survived practically intact,
without being dismembered or repeatedly sold. Accordingly, the practical entirety of
the album –some 120 drawings of the 126 known to exist– are in the Prado Museum’s
collection. Unlike the two preceding albums of drawings, which Goya purchased
already bound, the artist made this binding himself, and not with high quality Dutch
paper –as in the Sanlúcar and Madrid albums– but with sheets of Spanish writing
paper. That Goya used poorer quality paper would seem to reflect the financial
circumstances of the artist and the country during the war years and after, when it was
not possible to purchase quality paper. This fact has contributed to accentuating the
poor state of some of the album’s drawings caused by being executed in iron gall ink.
The Prado Museum does not possess any of the drawings contained in Album D (also
known as the Unfinished Album) or of Album E (also known as the Black Edges Album).
Drawn in Indian ink wash, the exact date of their execution is imprecise, which has given
rise to several theories. Recently J. Wilson has dated them from 1819-23 and 1816-20
respectively. Widely dispersed, they were well-made, especially the second, which is one
of the finest examples of Goya’s drawing due to the elegance of the arrangement of the
figures and the extraordinary skill of the wash technique in controlling the range of dye
solution density.
The Prado Museum has 22 drawings –98 drawings are known of a probable total of 106–
from Album F which were executed in oak gall ink wash from 1812-20. It contains mixed
subject matters, however one can discern similarities to topics dealt with in Album C,
which places it in the sphere of Spain at the time of the War of Independence and the
Post-war period. Accordingly, violence and its consequences in all its shapes and forms
are the protagonists, with greater or lesser explicitness, of these compositions.
The last two albums, known by the letters G and H, were executed in Bordeaux from
1824 to 1828. In these albums the elderly painter introduced a technical novelty, the
lithographic crayon, this time abandoning the Indian ink and oak gall ink washes. This
new medium reflected the interest that lithography and the practice of said procedure
had awakened in Goya during the last years of his life in Bordeaux. The use of a
lithographic crayon for drawing conferred him enormous freedom of expression. In all
likelihood both of these albums were preparatory sketches for a suite of etchings that
Goya planned to execute but which never materialized. The subject matter is wideranging, but in general the drawings depict people in the street in a range of different
postures and invariably in abnormal circumstances very often dominated by the
irrational. The Prado Museum has 14 and 29 drawings from each album respectively.
The albums were split up into several lots by Javier Goya and, on his death, were sold by
his son Mariano. Román Garreta, Federico de Madrazo’s brother-in-law, who was
Director of the Prado Museum at the time, purchased one of the lots containing 186
drawings and sold it on in 1866 to the short-lived Museo de la Trinidad. From whence it
returned to the Prado Museum in 1872, when the other museum closed.
Preparatory sketches for Goya’s etchings
Preparatory sketches were Goya’s chosen graphic medium for expressing his early
ideas for each of the compositions that he subsequently engraved onto copper plates,
and which became his four suites of etchings: Caprichos, The Disasters of War,
Tauromaquia and Disparates. Unlike traditional intaglio etchers, who made exact
etching designs of the composition that were subsequently copied faithfully and
precisely onto the copper plate, Goya’s preparatory sketches were solely his point of
departure, and these initial compositions were transformed during the etching process
until they reached their definitive state.
Goya’s devotion to engraving began when he made a series of etched copies of
paintings by Velázquez (1778-79) that were part of the Royal Collection. These etchings
were Goya’s way of learning the most agile forms of engraving – aqua fortis and
aquatint. Of the preparatory sketches for these, the Prado Museum only has the one
corresponding to Los Borrachos (D4330). On this occasion, the sketches bear a close
resemblance to etching designs, as their pencil or sanguine lines match the lines of the
etchings quite precisely.
It was with Caprichos, a suite of etchings printed in 1799, that Goya reached one of the
pinnacles of his art, not only artistically but intellectually too. The first drawing of the
suite known today as Sueños saw the light in 1797, and some of the Caprichos etchings
are absolutely faithful copies of drawings in the former suite. This collection of drawings,
executed with a quill pen in a very precise lineal style, was transferred onto the copper
plate as demonstrated by the marks left on the paper by the plate, these lines serving as a
template for the subsequent aqua fortis etching.
Some of these drawings owe their compositional and conceptual base to drawings
contained in the Madrid Album. The succession of images which leads from the Album’s
drawings to the Sueños drawings and finally to the etchings in the Caprichos suite, reveals
the meticulousness of Goya’s working methods, commencing with an idea sketched in
brushstrokes, he would refine it and turn it into a line drawing that could serve as a
preparatory sketch and which was finally reproduced as faithfully as possible in an
etching.
Sueños is the visual and conceptual precursor of Caprichos; in it one can find all the forms,
ideas and the great recurring themes. And similarly its themes are mixed together, not
unique to each drawing, thereby permitting a variety of interpretations. In them we can
find some of the subjects which concerned the enlightenment concealed behind the
imaginative demeanour of the author’s dreams: witchcraft as a manifestation of
ignorance, superstition and prostitution; the falsehood of marriages of convenience and
betrayal in romantic relationships; a condemnation of nobility clinging to values of the
past; criticism of the customs of courtship, of fops and of the milieu of prostitution; a
condemnation of vices, especially of lust; and asses as an allegorical depiction of the
ignorance of the powerful.
Sueños, like its predecessor, the Album B, and the Caprichos, features textual supports to
help the “reader” interpret the works. The titles of the some of the Album’s drawings turn
into comments written in pencil on some of the Sueños – sometimes they clarify the
meaning of the drawing, but on other occasions they simply shroud it in further
ambiguity, in the same manner as some of the titles given by Goya to his etchings. The
comparison between the two also allows us to infer the artist’s working method –
concealing, softening or slightly nuancing the original idea.
For his Caprichos, Goya would sometimes make two preparatory sketches; the lineal
technique of quill pen or sanguine was conferred to the etching in the lines of the aqua
fortis, while the sketches he made in wash were conferred to the aquatint effects of
shadow and light. The Prado Museum has one hundred and twenty sketch
compositions related to the Caprichos.
The second of the suites, The Disasters of War, evoked the events of the War of
Independence (1808-1814) and its immediate political consequences. It represents an
overwhelming cry against violence in its many guises, which has no justification
whatsoever, and yet thanks to such masterful technical, formal and conceptual
treatment the viewer contemplates images intrinsic to all wars. Sanguine was the
material most often employed by Goya in his preparatory sketches for this suite. On
comparing the preparatory sketches with the etchings, occasionally one can notice a
process of simplification of the composition.
This characteristic is also noticeable in the creative process of Tauromaquia, executed
in the same years. Although at first sight the most evident differences generally affect
a greater definition of the figures in the etchings of both suites, equally important is
the simplification of the composition which seeks greater narrative and expressive
clarity. The suppression of anything unnecessary occurs frequently in Goya’s art.
Sometimes, there are only very subtle differences between the preparatory sketch and
the etching. Apart from the already mentioned processes of simplification and
definition of the compositions’ backgrounds, the modifications introduced by Goya
when it came to engraving the plate serve to express in a more convincing manner the
subject he wishes to convey: the purest expression of violence and death. Starting with
real events, Goya universalizes his subjects, capturing their essence, the universal
representation of heroism, brutality, hunger, desperation, destruction and, most
importantly, death. And all of these subjects are acted out by anonymous people, the
true war victims. The Prado Museum has seventy-five of his preparatory sketches for
the The Disasters.
The third of his suites, Tauromaquia, printed in 1816, far from being a descriptive
graphic narration of bullfighting’s past and present, an attentive survey of the etchings
leads us to regard them as another expression of the violence that is consubstantial
with human beings, a manifestation of the irrational confrontation that leads to the
death of a man. Of this suite, the Prado Museum has forty-three preparatory sketches.
Lastly, there are nineteen preparatory sketches of Disparates, executed at an unknown
date between 1816 and 1824. These sketches are the ones that show most differences
with regard to the subsequent etchings. In effect, in contrast to sketches that show
strong similarities, there are others in which only a few graphic elements can be
recognized. The technique employed by Goya is red wash, applied liberally on top of a
sanguine drawing, which creates imprecise smudges of varying density. On occasions
these smudges are little more than a disjointed mass of brushstrokes which makes it
hard to discern the subject being depicted, but at the same time they confer the
sketches a great freedom and spontaneity, and strongly connect them, both
conceptually and in terms of form, with the Black Paintings.
Asides from the sketch for Los Borrachos, which comes from the Estate of Fernández
Durán (1930), the remaining preparatory sketches belonged to the painter’s son, Javier
Goya, and were handed down to his grandson Mariano, and from him to Valentín
Carderera, who must have acquired them from 1854 to 1860. They were subsequently
sold in a lot of 284 drawings by his heir, Mariano Carderera, to the Prado Museum in
1886.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------High resolution images are available at the Botín Foundation’s Press Office:
www.fundacionbotin.org
For more information:
Email: [email protected]
Telephone: 942 22 60 72
Chronological order of the catalogue (5 volumes)
Vol. 1
General introduction: Goya the drawer

Historiography of drawings by Goya

Dispersion of the drawings: provenance, collections, album order, numeration

Study of technique and media

Preparatory sketches and etching designs

The Album as a visual message

Attribution problems related to Goya’s oeuvre: copies, versions, fakes

Chronology
Vol. 2

Italian sketchbook

Preparatory sketches for the Velázquez etchings

Drawings for tapestry cartoons

Preparatory sketches for paintings and portraits (until 1790)

Drawings underneath tin plates

Independent drawings for other etchings

Drawings in letters
Vol. 3

Album A

Album B

Preparatory sketches for Sueños, Caprichos and others

Portraits for the book by Ceán Bermúdez

Vol. 4

Album C

Album F

Preparatory sketches for The Disasters of War

Preparatory sketches for Tauromaquia
Vol. 5

Album D

Album E

Preparatory sketches for Disparates and others

Album G

Album H

Other Bordeaux drawings

Lithography prints

Former attributions