About this work
The scene is deceptively playful: a group of women in ornamental dresses form a circle, gripping the edges of a large cloth and tossing a contorted figure into the air — each of them rendered with a disturbing smile and a peculiar malice.
Tangled within their improvised toss are puppets, a peasant, a donkey.
The entire composition is rendered in a monochromatic palette of etching and aquatint — dark, intricate lines pressing figures against a stark ground, with light and shadow used to animate the billowing fabric and the bodies in motion. The alternate title — *Heavier Than a Dead Donkey* — arrives like a punchline with no real humor in it, underlining what looks like play but reads as burden.
The plate dates to between 1815 and 1819.
The first print in the *Follies* series depicts six women chasing men and a donkey — a subject Goya had visited decades earlier in his 1791 tapestry cartoon *The Wimp*, but here he reworks it entirely, shifting from the smiling, optimistic tone of the earlier painting to something profoundly disturbing.
Goya produced the series during his final years in Madrid, amid personal illness, political turmoil following the Peninsular War, and self-imposed isolation at his Quinta del Sordo residence, where he concurrently painted the Black Paintings on its walls.
During Goya's lifetime, the series was not published because of the oppressive political climate and the Inquisition; it was first made public by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in 1864 — decades after his death.
Unlike the *Disasters of War*, which stacks horror upon horror, the *Disparates* operate differently: their grotesque creatures and inexplicable phenomena make it the most enigmatic of Goya's series — ominous, foreboding, and profoundly unnerving in a way that resists easy reading.
This is a print for rooms that can hold a long silence. It works in spaces with low, directed light — a study, a hallway, a library wall — where the interplay of dark ground and pale, agitated figures can breathe. The word *disparate* in Goya's time carried harsher connotations than "folly" — closer in meaning to stupidity or madness — and that charge still crackles off the image. The viewer it finds is one drawn to art that refuses to resolve: to imagery where a woman's smile is the most frightening thing in the room, and where the
