Goya: The Witches and Old Women Album

Fascinating and learned exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery bringing together nearly all the pictures from a Goya album of drawings.

I was lucky enough to attend the friends’ private view of this show with a talk by the curator Stephanie Buck which was a real insight into the work to bring these pictures together and to work out the order they appeared in the album. She said she become obsessed by dirt on the pictures as often it wasn’t dirt but an imprint of the picture on the previous or next page!

The pictures have hung in the order they appeared in the album and show Goya working through various creative ideas starting with floating figures and ending with very tender pictures of old women. The pictures were very freely drawn and yet were finished drawings of a fine quality.

A display in the centre of the room looked at Goya’s experiments with lithographs, which was a new technique, at this time. With the drawings this showed a man still experimenting with ideas and techniques even though he was 70 and profoundly deaf.

This is a really well thought through and intellectual show without being heavy or too full of information and you so want the only drawing which is missing to reappear!

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