Delacroix 2018

17. Figures after Goya’s Les Caprices Feuille d’études d’après Les Caprices de Goya

Pen and brown ink with wash on paper 8 7 ⁄ 8 x 13 1 ⁄ 2 inches (22.6 x 34.5 cm)

LITERATURE P. Fayos-Perez, “A New Drawing by Delacroix after Goya’s Capricho’s,” (article in preparation). This sheet combines figures from two plates of Goya’s Los Caprichos series of prints. On the left are two of the three figures from Plate 31, Ruega por ella ( She prays for her ) and on the right, the figure from Por que fue sensible ( Because she was susceptible ). It is believed that Delacroix acquired a complete set of Los Caprichos as early as 1824, when a Journal entry on March 19 recounts that he spent the evening looking at Goya in his studio with the painter Edouard Bertin. (see Kilman, “Delacroix’s Lions and Tigers; A Link Between Man and Nature,” The Art Bulletin , vol. 64, no. 3. September 1982, p. 453 and note 46.) Eleven study sheets after Goya passed through Delacroix’s posthumous atelier sale (lot 640), but there are also examples of Delacroix’s copies of Goya that do not bear the estate mark. Fifteen of these are in the Louvre, as Maurice Sérullaz noted in the 1984 inventory of drawings by Delacroix.

Left to right: Goya, Plate 31 from ’Los

Caprichos’: She prays for her (Ruega por ella) , 1799, etching and burnished aquatint Goya, Plate 32 from ’Los Caprichos’: Because she was susceptible (Por que fue sensible) , 1799, aquatint