Los Caprichos.

£200,000 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books

one of approximately 300 copies The complete set of eighty etchings with burnished aquatint, drypoint and engraving, 1797-1798, on laid paper. A very good set from the first edition, published by the artist in an edition of approximately three hundred copies. With Los Caprichos, Goya for the first time made his vision of the more sinister side of Spanish society – and the human soul in general – accessible to a wider audience, beyond his small group of friends and patrons. Goya was commercially ambitious, and set himself an enormous undertaking, prepared over several years and based on hundreds of drawings. Harris has estimated that he produced 300 sets (i.e. 24,000 impressions) of the Caprichos, making it at the time the largest series of prints ever conceived by a single artist. But the bitter reality was that perhaps only some thirty sets of this first and only lifetime edition were sold. In 1803, the artist gave the plates and the remaining impressions to the King, presumably to escape the wrath of the Inquisition. In hindsight Los Caprichos is the pivotal work of Goya's entire oeuvre. In one grandiose, dark symphony he unleashes both his unsparing satirical sense and his wild imagination, plate after plate, tied loosely together by related motifs and laconic, often mysterious titles. The only plate without an engraved title is perhaps the most famous of all: the artist, overcome by sleep, with his head resting on a table, is surrounded by creatures of the night: owls, ba

• Binding: Hardcover

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