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FRANCISCO DE GOYA Y LUCIENTES

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Que hai que hacer mas? (What More Can One Do?), plate 33 from Desastres de la Guerra (Disasters of War), circa 1810

Etching and burnished aquatint in sepia, on wove paper with O watermark, with margins, I. 6 1/8 x 8 1/8 in. (15.6 x 20.6 cm); S. 9 7/8 x 13 7/8 in. (25.1 x 35.2 cm), from the first edition, published in the Workshop of Laurenciano Potenciano for the Real Academia, 1863, soiling and occasional staining in the margins, time staining, otherwise in good condition, unframed.

PROVENANCE Stephen Longstreet (1907-2002) inkstamp
LITERATURE Loys Delteil 152; Tomás Harris 153

In the 80 images Goya produced for the Desastres de la Guerra series, they fall into three general subjects: plates 2-47 are scenes of guerilla war against the Napoleonic troops (as these three lots attest), plates 48-64 are scenes of the 1811-1812 famine in Madrid and plates 65-82 are allegories attacking the reactionary forces that fostered corruption and caused the downfall of the brief constitutional government.  ...Disasters are much more than reportage. ..., but they reveal human brutality with a far greater intensity. It is significant that this intensity was protracted over as many as thirteen years (1810-23) as the Disasters we composed and executed. To interpret the series as a cathartic scream of despair is, therefore, to misunderstand it. Even though it [the series] was not published until twenty-five years after his death, Goya surely anticipated its moral impact on posterity. Some of the harshest indictments of war in twentieth-century art (especially Picasso's Guernica and related works) have been nourished by what Goya 'saw'. (Linda C. Hults The Print in the Western World, The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1996 p. 413)

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