Francisco Goya: Deaf at 46, Painted the Black Paintings on His Own Walls at 74, and Saturn Was on the Dining Room Wall

May 27, 2026

Goya Saturn Devouring His Son biography DeckArts Berlin

Last updated: May 2026 · By Stanislav Arnautov · Berlin

Quick answer

Francisco Goya (1746–1828) was the first modern painter. He was deaf from 46, politically isolated from 74, and painted the Black Paintings on the walls of his own house at 74–78 — never intending them to be seen. Saturn Devouring His Son (c.1820–23, Prado Madrid) was cut from the dining room wall. Diptych (~$230) on forest green or near-black. DeckArts from ~$230.

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (30 March 1746 – 16 April 1828) is the first painter in the Western tradition to make his private psychological condition — his deafness, his isolation, his political fear — the explicit subject of major works. He was a court painter under four Spanish monarchs and privately made images that would not have been comprehensible to those same courts. He lived to 82, went deaf at 46, and painted the Black Paintings on the walls of his own home between the ages of approximately 74 and 78 — works never documented by him, never publicly exhibited in his lifetime, and never intended (as far as we can determine) for any viewer but himself. External references: Prado Madrid — Saturn Devouring His Son; National Gallery London — Goya. DeckArts Berlin from ~$230. View Saturn Devouring His Son at DeckArts →

Goya’s Biography: The First Modern Painter

Goya was born on 30 March 1746 in Fuendetodos, a small village in Aragon, Spain, the son of a master gilder. He trained in Zaragoza under José Lúzán and later in Madrid under Francisco Bayeu (whose sister Josefa he married in 1773, forming the family connection that helped establish his career at the Spanish court). He also spent time in Italy (c.1770–1771) studying the Italian tradition.

His court career: Goya was appointed painter to the Spanish royal tapestry factory (Real Fábrica de Tapices de Santa Bárbara) in 1776, producing tapestry cartoons (preparatory designs for woven tapestries) depicting festive and recreational scenes of Spanish popular life. He was made a member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in 1780 and court painter (Pintor del Rey) in 1786 under Charles III. Under Charles IV he became First Court Painter (Primer Pintor de Cámara) in 1799. These are the highest official recognition available to a Spanish painter of the period.

The political trajectory: the French invasion of Spain (1808) and the subsequent Peninsular War (1808–1814) placed Goya in an impossible position. He had painted portraits of the Spanish Bourbon court; he subsequently painted portraits of Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte (who briefly ruled Spain as José I); he returned to painting the restored Bourbon court after 1814. His private response to the Peninsular War is documented in the Disasters of War prints series (Desastres de la Guerra, c.1810–1820), a series of 82 aquatint etchings depicting the atrocities of the French occupation and the Spanish guerrilla response with documentary brutality unprecedented in the history of printmaking. The Disasters of War were not published in Goya’s lifetime — the first edition was published in 1863, 35 years after his death.

The exile: following the liberal constitution period (1820–1823) and the subsequent restoration of Ferdinand VII’s absolute monarchy and the political repression that followed, Goya left Spain in 1824 at 78, settling in Bordeaux, France. He died in Bordeaux on 16 April 1828, aged 82, having spent his last four years in voluntary exile from Spain. He never returned.

The Deafness: 1792–1828, 36 Years in Silence

In 1792–1793, Goya suffered a severe illness (the specific diagnosis is unknown; the most commonly proposed explanations include lead poisoning from his paint, a neurological condition, or a viral encephalitis) that left him permanently and totally deaf. He was 46 years old. He spent the remaining 36 years of his life — from 46 to 82 — in complete deafness.

The biographical significance of the deafness: it did not end his career — he continued to be the most celebrated painter in Spain for decades after becoming deaf, and he made some of his most celebrated works (the Majas, the Disasters of War, the Third of May 1808, the Black Paintings) after 1792. But it profoundly altered his relationship to the world and to his work. Goya wrote to a friend shortly after his illness: “The noise in my head and the deafness have not stopped, yet I am well in other ways. I can no longer put up with them, for they interfere with my work.” The deafness is the first biographical fault-line in what became the explicit subject of the Black Paintings: the experience of absolute isolation, the interior condition of a person cut off from the auditory world, painted in absolute darkness on the walls of a house he called the “Quinta del Sordo” — the House of the Deaf Man.

The Black Paintings: Painted on His Own Walls, Never to Be Seen

The Black Paintings (Pinturas Negras) are a series of 14 works that Goya painted directly on the plaster walls of the Quinta del Sordo (“Villa of the Deaf Man,” a two-storey farmhouse he purchased in 1819 on the outskirts of Madrid) between approximately 1819 and 1823 — when Goya was between 73 and 77 years old. They were painted in oil paint directly on the plaster (not on canvas or panel — they were wall paintings, like frescoes). There are 14 works, on two floors: eight on the ground floor, six on the upper floor.

The specific biographical fact about the Black Paintings that distinguishes them from all other major works in Western art history: they were never documented by Goya in any letter, journal, or public statement; they were never publicly exhibited in his lifetime; no contemporary account describes them; Goya never explained or titled them. The titles we use today (Saturn Devouring His Son, The Pilgrimage to San Isidro, Two Old Men Eating Soup, Witches’ Sabbath) were given by art historians and museum curators after the works were transferred to canvas in the 1870s. We do not know what Goya called them, or whether he considered them finished, or what he intended by them. The most extreme biographical argument about the Black Paintings: they were made for no viewer but Goya himself — private psychological documents painted on the walls of his own home, invisible from outside, and never described.

As The Guardian’s Goya coverage documents, the Black Paintings are consistently ranked among the most psychologically intense works in the Western tradition, and the mystery of their specific intention remains unresolved in art historical scholarship.

Saturn Devouring His Son: The Dining Room Wall

Saturn Devouring His Son (Saturno devorando a su hijo, c.1820–1823, oil on plaster transferred to canvas, 143.5 × 81.4 cm, Prado Madrid) was painted on the ground floor of the Quinta del Sordo, on the lower section of the left wall of the dining room. A painting of a cannibal god, depicted in the act of consuming a human body, was painted on the wall of the room where Goya ate his meals.

The composition: Saturn (Cronus in the Greek tradition) is depicted in three-quarter view against an absolute dark background. He is enormous relative to the half-consumed body he holds. His hands grip the body at the waist; his teeth are in the body at the right shoulder area; the body’s head and right arm have already been consumed. His eyes are wide, staring forward, in an expression that combines horror, compulsion, and desperation. He is not depicted as a powerful divine figure consuming a lesser being from strength; he is depicted as a figure in the grip of a compulsion he cannot resist — terrified of what he is doing but unable to stop.

The mythological source: Cronus (Saturn) was the Titan who overthrew his father Uranus and in turn feared being overthrown by his own children. To prevent the prophecy, he devoured each child at birth. The myth’s specific argument: the fear of succession — the terror of being replaced by the next generation — consuming the very thing it fears losing. For Goya at 74, deaf and politically isolated, painting this on his dining room wall: the most specific private statement about power, fear, age, and consumption available in the Western mythological vocabulary.

The Prado and the Transfer to Canvas

The Black Paintings remained on the walls of the Quinta del Sordo after Goya’s death and after the house passed through several owners. In 1874, the Quinta del Sordo was purchased by the French banker Frédéric Emile Baron d’Erlanger, who commissioned the transfer of the Black Paintings from the plaster walls to canvas. The transfer was carried out by the restorer Salvador Martínez Cubells in 1874. The transfer process involves: applying a canvas backing to the painted plaster surface; cutting the plaster away from behind; and attaching the canvas+paint layer to a new canvas support. The process is technically hazardous and several of the Black Paintings show paint loss and damage from the transfer.

The transferred canvases were exhibited at the 1878 Paris Universal Exhibition and subsequently donated to the Spanish state by Baron d’Erlanger. The Saturn and the other Black Paintings have been at the Prado in Madrid since 1881. The Prado’s Room 67 holds the complete Black Paintings programme; their installation in a single room at the Prado is the closest available approximation to their original environment (the two floors of the Quinta del Sordo), but the original contextual relationship between the works — the specific positions of each painting relative to the others, and relative to the rooms’ functions — is permanently lost.

The Two Goyas: Court Painter and Private Horror

Goya’s career presents the most specific bifurcation in the history of Western painting: the public career (the brilliant, celebrated, court-appointed First Painter to the King, whose tapestry cartoons depict festive popular life and whose royal portraits are among the most technically accomplished in Spanish art history) and the private practice (the Disasters of War, the Black Paintings, the Saturn) whose content and psychology are entirely incompatible with the public career’s programme.

The tapestry cartoons (1776–1792): bright colours, festive scenes, popular celebration, bucolic landscapes. The Parasol (1777), The Swing (1779), The Crockery Vendor (1779). These are not minor works; they are technically accomplished, compositionally inventive, and represent the period when Goya was establishing himself as the most gifted painter of his generation. They are completely unlike the Saturn.

The Third of May 1808 (1814, Prado Madrid, 268×347 cm): the painting that provides the transitional biographical link between the public and private Goyas. Painted after the liberation of Spain from French occupation, it depicts the execution of Spanish civilians by French soldiers on 3 May 1808. The anonymous man in the white shirt, arms outstretched, facing the firing squad — the image of the victim as the painting’s moral centre rather than the heroic figure — is the most specific single turning point in Western art’s relationship to the representation of atrocity. Picasso’s Guernica (1937) is explicitly in the tradition of the Third of May. As National Gallery London’s Goya resources note, his influence on 19th and 20th-century painting is the most specific and most documented influence of any 18th-century Spanish painter.

Saturn on a Skateboard Diptych

The DeckArts Saturn Devouring His Son diptych (~$230, ~45 cm wide) presents two vertical crops of the Prado canvas: the left deck (the Saturn figure’s upper body, the hands gripping the consumed body at the waist, the wide-staring eyes) and the right deck (the consumed body’s remaining lower section, the absolute dark background, the composition’s right zone). The near-absolute dark background — the same absolute dark as Caravaggio’s tenebrism — is the composition’s dominant visual element on any wall colour.

On forest green or near-black: The warm flesh tones of the Saturn figure and the consumed body advance from the combined dark (painting’s absolute dark + forest green wall’s organic dark, or painting’s dark + near-black wall’s dark). The most confrontational installation in the DeckArts range: the dining room wall painting above the 2026 dining table, the dark academia study’s existential anchor, the gallery wall’s darkness programme element.

Goya Saturn devouring skateboard diptych DeckArts Berlin

Goya Saturn Devouring His Son — Diptych (~$230)

Painted on dining room wall at age 74 · never intended to be seen · Prado Madrid since 1881 · forest green or near-black · UV archival 100+ years · Canadian maple

View product →

Room-by-Room Installation Guide

Dining room (most contextually specific): Diptych (~$230) on forest green or warm charcoal beside or above the dining table at 155–165 cm centre. The painting of the cannibal god that Goya painted on his own dining room wall, above the 2026 dinner table: the most inexhaustible and the most confrontational dining room art installation at DeckArts. The dinner conversation starting point: “Goya painted this at 74, deaf, politically isolated, on the wall of his own dining room. He never described it. We have no idea what he called it.” See: Wall Art for a Dining Room 2026.

Dark academia study (Darkness Programme): Diptych (~$230) on forest green or warm charcoal as part of the Darkness Programme: Saturn diptych (Goya, c.1820–23) + Night Watch triptych (Rembrandt, 1642) + Melencolia I single (Dürer, 1514). Three Northern European and Iberian responses to the conditions of intellectual and creative practice across three centuries. See: How to Style a Dark Academia Room.

Gallery wall (Darkness Programme): Diptych (~$230) as the dark element of a themed gallery wall: Night Watch triptych (civic collective warm Dutch Golden Age) + Medusa single (Italian Baroque confrontational) + Saturn diptych (Spanish existential private). Three types of darkness, three centuries, three national traditions. See: How to Style a Gallery Wall 2026.

FAQ

Why did Goya paint Saturn on his dining room wall?

We don’t know. The Black Paintings (including Saturn) were never documented by Goya in any letter, journal, or public statement; he never titled them, never exhibited them in his lifetime, and never explained them to any documented visitor. The titles we use are posthumous inventions by art historians. The most specific biographical argument: Goya at 74 — deaf since 46, politically isolated under the restored absolute monarchy of Ferdinand VII, and living alone in the Quinta del Sordo — painted these on his own walls for no viewer but himself. Saturn was specifically on the dining room wall. Prado Madrid. DeckArts from ~$230.

Where is Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son?

Saturn Devouring His Son (c.1820–1823, oil on plaster transferred to canvas, 143.5×81.4 cm) is at the Prado in Madrid, Room 67, with the other 13 Black Paintings. It was transferred from the plaster walls of the Quinta del Sordo to canvas by restorer Salvador Martínez Cubells in 1874, under the direction of Baron d’Erlanger. It was exhibited at the 1878 Paris Universal Exhibition and donated to the Spanish state; it has been at the Prado since 1881. DeckArts diptych from ~$230.

Was Goya deaf?

Yes, from 1792–1793 (age 46) until his death in 1828 (age 82) — 36 years of total deafness. The cause is unknown (lead poisoning, neurological condition, and viral encephalitis are the most commonly proposed). He wrote to a friend shortly after his illness that “the noise in my head and the deafness have not stopped” but that he was “well in other ways.” He continued to be the most celebrated painter in Spain for decades after becoming deaf. The house he purchased in 1819 (where he painted the Black Paintings) was called the Quinta del Sordo — the House of the Deaf Man. DeckArts from ~$230.

Related Guides

Article Summary

Goya biography wall art: born 30 March 1746 Fuendetodos Aragon Spain (master gilder’s son); trained Zaragoza (Luis Lúzán) + Madrid (Francisco Bayeu, married Bayeu’s sister Josefa 1773); Italy c.1770–1771; court career: Real Fábrica de Tapices de Santa Bárbara 1776 (tapestry cartoons festive scenes), Academia San Fernando 1780, Pintor del Rey 1786 Charles III, Primer Pintor de Cámara 1799 Charles IV; political trajectory: French invasion 1808 + Peninsular War 1808–1814 (impossible position: painted Bourbon court, then Joseph Bonaparte portraits, then restored Bourbon court); Disasters of War c.1810–1820 (82 aquatint etchings, documentary brutality, unprecedented in printmaking history, first published 1863 = 35 years posthumously); exile 1824 (liberal constitution period 1820–1823, Ferdinand VII restored absolute monarchy + repression, Goya left Spain at 78, settled Bordeaux, died Bordeaux 16 April 1828 aged 82, never returned). Deafness: 1792–1793 aged 46 (specific cause unknown; lead poisoning/neurological/viral encephalitis proposed); total permanent deafness; 36 years in silence (46 to 82); continued most celebrated painter in Spain; wrote to friend “noise in my head and deafness have not stopped…interfere with my work”; first biographical fault-line making private psychological condition explicit subject of major works; Quinta del Sordo (Villa of the Deaf Man) purchased 1819 = site of Black Paintings. Black Paintings: 14 works directly on plaster walls of Quinta del Sordo c.1819–1823 (Goya aged ~73–77); oil paint directly on plaster (not canvas or panel; wall paintings like frescoes); 8 ground floor + 6 upper floor; most specific biographical fact: never documented by Goya in any letter/journal/public statement; never publicly exhibited in his lifetime; no contemporary account describes them; never titled or explained; posthumous titles (Saturn/Pilgrimage to San Isidro/Two Old Men Eating Soup/Witches’ Sabbath) given by art historians + museum curators after transfer to canvas 1870s; most extreme biographical argument: made for no viewer but Goya himself = private psychological documents on walls of own home; Guardian Goya coverage on psychological intensity + mystery of intention. Saturn: Saturno devorando a su hijo c.1820–1823, oil on plaster transferred to canvas, 143.5×81.4 cm, Prado Madrid; painted ground floor Quinta del Sordo, lower section LEFT WALL of the DINING ROOM; composition: Saturn three-quarter view vs absolute dark background, enormous vs half-consumed body, hands grip body at waist, teeth in body at right shoulder, head + right arm already consumed, wide staring eyes in expression combining horror/compulsion/desperation (not powerful divine from strength but figure gripped by compulsion unable to stop = terrified of what he is doing); mythological source: Cronus (Saturn) = overthrew Uranus, feared being overthrown by children, devoured each child at birth; myth’s argument: fear of succession consuming what it fears losing; biographical argument at 74: most specific private statement about power/fear/age/consumption available in Western mythological vocabulary. Prado transfer: Quinta del Sordo passed through owners after Goya’s death; 1874 purchased by Baron Frédéric Emile d’Erlanger (French banker); commissioned transfer (restorer Salvador Martínez Cubells; canvas backing applied to painted plaster, plaster cut away, canvas+paint attached to new canvas support; technically hazardous, paint loss and damage in several works); exhibited 1878 Paris Universal Exhibition; donated Spanish state by d’Erlanger; Prado since 1881 Room 67; original contextual relationships permanently lost. Two Goyas: tapestry cartoons (1776–1792, The Parasol 1777/The Swing 1779/The Crockery Vendor 1779, bright colours/festive/bucolic, technically accomplished/compositionally inventive, completely unlike Saturn); Third of May 1808 (1814, Prado, 268×347 cm, anonymous man in white shirt arms outstretched facing firing squad = victim as moral centre not heroic figure = most specific single turning point in Western art’s relationship to representation of atrocity; Guernica 1937 explicitly in this tradition; National Gallery London Goya resources). On deck diptych: left deck (Saturn upper body, hands gripping, wide staring eyes); right deck (consumed body’s remaining section, absolute dark background right zone); forest green or near-black (warm flesh from combined painting absolute dark + wall organic dark, most confrontational). Installation: dining room (most contextually specific: painting of cannibal god from own dining room wall above 2026 dinner table, most inexhaustible confrontational dining installation; gift conversation starter text); dark academia study Darkness Programme (Saturn + Night Watch + Melencolia I, three centuries three responses); gallery wall Darkness Programme (Night Watch + Medusa + Saturn). Prado Madrid + National Gallery London + Guardian Goya references. DeckArts from ~$230. Canadian maple. UV archival 100+ years. Berlin. 30-day return.