In 1817 Goya visited Seville to paint the picture of Santas Justa and Rufina for the Cathedral, to which reference has been made. On his return he designed a new series of Caprices, and executed many portraits and miniatures on ivory. It was at this time, too, that he made his first essay in lithography. The earliest of these lithographs is a fine brush drawing of an old woman spinning. It is signed and dated February 1819. Among the drawings upon stone that were executed about this period, the two most important are ‘Los Chiens,’ a bull attacked by dogs, and the splendid diabolical scene of a man being dragged along by demons. This last, which is in the Print Room of the British Museum, has special interest, as it is the first known wash drawing made upon the stone. M. Lefort mentions six other lithographs which were executed at Madrid before the journey to France: a duel between two people, a young woman reading to two children, a monk, a girl sitting on the knee of an old woman with other women in the background, a drunkard and a woman, and a peasant assaulting a girl.
The date of the execution of ‘Los Proverbios,’ the fourth series of Goya’s etchings,--‘the last thunderbolt of his genius,’--is uncertain. Probably they belong to those years when, under the weight of distress of spirits in his lonely home on the Manzanares, he sketched the world within him as it appeared to his gloomy imagination. The plates are without explanatory titles, and their meaning is obscure. Mr. Rothenstein finds in the larger size and broader execution of the plates themselves the reason for his belief that these are the last etchings by Goya’s hand before his failing eyesight forced him to lay aside the needle. The plates were first printed in 1830. This edition was edited with little care, and in 1864 a second edition was undertaken by the Academy of San Fernando. There were eighteen of these plates, but three more, reproduced much later in _L’Art_, may be placed among them.
There remain several important etchings; among them the three fine and impressive plates of ‘The Prisoners’ come first in importance. In these, as Mr. Rothenstein has said, ‘Goya’s powers as an etcher and his sympathy for suffering are demonstrated in a striking and singularly direct manner.’ Beneath the prints he has written in three sentences, his last protest against injustice: ‘The safe guarding of a prisoner does not necessitate torture’; ‘If he is guilty, why not kill him at once?’ ‘So much barbarity in the treatment equals the crime committed.’ The first proofs of these prints Goya gave to his friend, Cean Bermudez. The plates known as _Obras Sueltas_ were not, as far as we know, printed in Goya’s lifetime. They show a man swinging a woman on a swing, with a cat watching her from the bough of a tree; a bull-fighter with a bull lying down behind him; and two representations of _majas_. They were first etched at Bordeaux, and from the somewhat crude style of the work, probably were the last prints executed by Goya.