Francisco Goya's Los Caprichos went on sale in Madrid on February 6, 1799, in an eighty-print set. The shop was unusual: a perfume and liquor store near his own apartment. No regular bookseller would take them. Goya, then court painter, had spent two years etching these satires of superstition, corruption, and the clergy, and he was nervous about the Inquisition. The set was withdrawn within about two weeks, with only 27 sets sold out of an edition of 300.
The most famous plate is number 43. A man slumps over a desk, head buried in his arms, while owls and bats swirl behind him and a lynx watches from below. One owl is handing him a drawing tool. The message is carved on the front of the desk: El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.
There is a catch in the title. In Spanish, sueño means both sleep and dream. So the line can read as the dream of reason produces monsters, not only the sleep. Is reason failing, or is it dreaming up the nightmares? Goya leaves the question open.
The plate was first drawn as the frontispiece of the series. A preparatory drawing is titled Universal Language and carries a note that the artist, dreaming, intended to banish harmful beliefs. In the finished set, it moved to the middle as number 43.
The set failed as a business, but Goya found a way to save it. In 1803 he gave the copper plates and the remaining prints to King Charles IV, in exchange for a pension for his son. The plates survive, and the series that nobody bought became one of the most influential print sets ever made.
Goya's The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters appears on our: