Plate 43 from Los Caprichos: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (El sueno de la razon produce monstruos)

This is one sheet from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's complete set of the first edition of Francisco Goya's Los Caprichos, printed and offered for sale in Madrid in February 1799 and withdrawn from public sale about two weeks later. Plate 43 shows a man, understood to be Goya himself, asleep at a table while owls and bats swarm out of the darkness behind him and a lynx watches from below; Goya's own working drawing shows he had first planned this exact image, captioned Universal Language: The Author Dreaming, as the frontispiece of the whole album before moving his self-portrait to plate 1 and relegating this design to the middle of the sequence.

The same copper plate that made this 1799 impression was printed from for more than a century afterward by the Spanish royal print works, and the Metropolitan itself owns a second, later impression of the identical design pulled around 1908-1912 from a plate worn by a hundred years of use. This record describes only the first-edition sheet, accession 18.64(43), a gift of the dealer M. Knoedler and Co. in 1918.

In 1803 Goya handed the eighty plates and 240 unsold sets to Charles IV in exchange for a pension for his son. What happened to the roughly thirty sets unaccounted for between the 27 sold in 1799 and the 240 later surrendered to the Crown is not established in the sources consulted.

The sheet itself

The object described in this record is a single sheet of paper, 29.5 by 21 centimetres, carrying an etched, aquatinted image 21.2 by 15.1 centimetres, printed from a copper plate Goya etched in 1797-99 and numbered 43 at the upper right. Beneath the image runs the printed caption El sueno de la razon produce monstruos. It is one of eighty such sheets that together make up accession 18.64 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, catalogued by the museum as a complete set of the first edition of Los Caprichos, a gift of the New York art dealer M. Knoedler and Co. in 1918.

Nothing about the sheet is unique in the way a painting is unique. Roughly three hundred copies of this same image were pulled from the same plate in the first printing alone, and the plate went on being printed from for more than a hundred years afterward. What makes any one sheet identifiable as this object is the specific combination of plate state, paper, ink and accession history that ties it to a documented pull. That combination is the subject of much of what follows.

How the image was pulled

Goya worked the plate in etching for the drawn line, aquatint for the broad tonal washes that give the print its smoky, atmospheric dark, and drypoint and burin for local reinforcement. Aquatint was still a comparatively new technique in Spain in the 1790s, and Los Caprichos is generally treated as the series in which Goya first used it with full technical command, laying grain over the plate in graduated bites to produce the soft gradation from the lit page under the sleeping man's arms to the near-black in which the owls and bats materialise.

Impression quality depends entirely on how much wear the plate had taken by the time a given sheet was pulled. Early pulls carry a full range of aquatint tone and a crisp bitten line; later pulls, printed after the plate had been reworked and reprinted for a century, show flattened blacks and a coarser, more mechanical grain as the fine tonal steps wear away. This distinction is not incidental to the object described here - it is the reason this record exists in its present form, addressed directly below.

What the image shows

A man slumps forward over a table or portfolio, head buried in his folded arms, asleep. Behind and above him a mass of owls and bats crowds out of the dark, and at the lower right a lynx-like wildcat crouches, eyes open, alert in exactly the way the sleeping man is not. The printed caption reads, in translation, The sleep of reason produces monsters.

A longer gloss on the image survives in a manuscript commentary associated with the album, sometimes attributed to Goya's own circle: Fantasia abandonada de la razon, produce monstruos imposibles: unida con ella, es madre de las artes y origen de sus marabillas - fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with reason, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their wonders. Read against that longer text, the image is not a simple endorsement of reason over superstition. It states a balance: reason without imagination is sterile, imagination without reason breeds monsters, and the print's own darkness is itself an argument for keeping the two together rather than a straightforward Enlightenment slogan. Scholars including Philip Hofer have argued that Goya's decision to move this ambivalent image out of the frontispiece position was itself a form of caution, since a design built partly on ideas associable with Rousseau would have read as more politically pointed as the announced keynote of the whole series than it does at plate 43. That argument is Hofer's; it is not stated by Goya in any surviving document, and it is presented here as an interpretation, not a fact about Goya's intentions.

Planned as the frontispiece, moved to the middle

A preparatory drawing for this design survives at the Museo del Prado, in pen and brown ink, inscribed at the top Sueno 1 (Dream 1). On the table in the drawing Goya wrote Ydioma universal. Dibujado y grabado por Fco. de Goya, ano 1797 (Universal language. Drawn and etched by Francisco Goya, year 1797), and beneath the image, El autor sonando (The author dreaming). The drawing's ownership is documented in an unbroken line from Goya's son Javier, to his grandson Mariano Goya by 1854, to the collector Valentin Carderera around 1861, to Mariano Carderera in 1880, and into the Prado in 1886.

Read together with other surviving material for the album, the drawing is the basis for the standard account that Goya first conceived this design, under the working title Suenos (Dreams), as the opening image and effective manifesto of the whole series. In the published album as it appeared in 1799, the opening image is a different self-portrait entirely - the sober, top-hatted likeness captioned Franco. Goya y Lucientes, Pintor, placed at plate 1 - and the dreaming-author design was moved to plate 43, roughly the midpoint of the eighty-plate sequence, where it marks the hinge between the album's first half of social and behavioural satire and its darker second half of witches, demons and night. The reordering itself is documented by the surviving drawing and its inscription; the reasoning behind it is inference, not a statement by Goya, and is treated that way throughout this record.

Thirteen days in Madrid

Goya announced the series on the front page of the Diario de Madrid on 6 February 1799: a collection of eighty prints of capricious subjects, invented and etched by himself, on sale at a shop selling perfume and liquor at number 1, Calle del Desengano, near his own house, at 320 reales de vellon the set - a price contemporaries equated to roughly one ounce of gold. The advertisement insisted the subjects were drawn from the universal, not aimed at any named individual.

The withdrawal that followed is one of the most repeated episodes in Spanish art history, and the sources disagree on its length. The best-supported modern account holds that the album stayed on sale for about a fortnight, roughly thirteen to fourteen days, during which 27 sets were sold out of an edition usually put at around three hundred, before Goya pulled the remaining stock from the shop. Goya's own later account does not match this: in a letter of 1803 to the treasury minister Miguel Cayetano Soler, he stated the series had been on sale for only two days. Modern cataloguers treat the two-day figure as Goya's own retrospective minimisation rather than the documented fact, since the fourteen-day figure is the one supported by the contemporary record.

Why Goya withdrew the album is genuinely contested, and the theories are not the same claim dressed differently. Goya's own explanation, so far as one survives, is indirect: a 1825 letter to his friend Joaquin Ferrer, written in exile in Bordeaux, states that he had been denounced to the Inquisition over the prints. No Inquisition trial record for Goya over Los Caprichos has been found, so this is Goya's own claim, uncorroborated by a surviving case file. A second, complementary line of art-historical argument notes the political timing: the reform-minded ministers who might have offered Goya cover, chiefly Manuel Godoy and Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, had themselves been removed from government in the course of 1798, so that by February 1799 Goya had no comparable protection at court. A third, more skeptical reading, associated with commentary on the album's poor commercial result, holds that the withdrawal is better explained by weak sales at a very high price through an unconventional retail outlet - a perfumer's, not a bookshop - than by any active threat, and that the Inquisition explanation is Goya's own later dramatisation of what was in fact a commercial disappointment. This record presents all three as distinct, documented positions rather than blending them into a single smooth story.

Twelve thousand reales a year

Goya did not sell the plates. In 1803, in a letter to Miguel Cayetano Soler, he offered King Charles IV the eighty copper plates of Los Caprichos together with 240 unsold printed sets, for deposit at the Real Calcografia, the royal print works, in exchange for a lifetime pension of 12,000 reales a year for his son, Francisco Javier Goya, who wished to study painting. It was, on its face, not a cash transaction but a favour done in the language of royal patronage, and it is documented as such in the surviving correspondence summarised by modern cataloguers.

The arithmetic does not fully close in the sources consulted for this record. An edition commonly put at around 300 sets, minus the 27 sold in February 1799 and the 240 sets Goya later surrendered to the Crown, leaves roughly 33 sets unaccounted for - copies that may have been sold quietly after the formal withdrawal, given away, spoiled, or held back for reasons not recorded. This gap is noted in open questions below rather than bridged with a guess.

Later commentators have proposed, as an interpretation rather than a documented motive, that the Crown's interest in acquiring a provocative and only lightly circulated series had as much to do with controlling it as with preserving it. No document in the sources consulted states this as the Crown's reason; it is included here, graded as argued rather than documented, because it recurs in serious secondary literature on the transaction.

A plate printed for a hundred and seventy years

After 1803 the plates belonged to the Real Calcografia, the institution today known as the Calcografia Nacional, part of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. The Academy went on printing from the original eighty plates for well over a century. Secondary sources differ on the precise count of official editions - figures of twelve, thirteen and twenty total editions across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries all appear in material consulted for this record, a discrepancy this record has not been able to resolve and is stating plainly rather than picking one figure to sound authoritative. What is consistent across sources is the broad shape: further print runs through most of the nineteenth century, a further cluster in the first decades of the twentieth, and a final official edition dated 1970.

Since 2022 the Real Academia has been conserving 228 of Goya's plates across four series - the Caprichos, the Desastres de la Guerra, the Tauromaquia and the Disparates - work that has included stabilising a nineteenth- and twentieth-century electrolytic steel coating applied to protect the copper. The Academy has stated it will not print from the restored plates again, converting them permanently from working tools into conserved artefacts. A selection is on public view at the Gabinete Francisco de Goya in Madrid, shown alongside digital reproductions of the prints they made.

The same plate, printed eleven decades apart

The clearest demonstration of why edition matters for this object is not an external comparison but an internal one. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds two separate, independently accessioned impressions of plate 43, pulled from the same copper plate more than a century apart. The sheet described in this record, accession 18.64(43), belongs to the museum's complete set of the first edition, 1799, given by M. Knoedler and Co. in 1918. A second Metropolitan sheet, accession 1986.1180.895, bequeathed by Grace M. Pugh in 1985, is catalogued by the museum itself as printed in 1908-1912 - one of the twentieth-century Calcografia print runs, pulled more than a hundred years after Goya's death from a plate that had by then been printed thousands of times and steel-faced for durability.

The two sheets show the same design, carry the same plate number, and sit in the same museum's storerooms under superficially similar-looking accession codes. Only the object record - the year of the gift, the donor's name, the edition field - distinguishes a sheet worth citing as a document of 1799 Madrid from a sheet that documents a print shop's routine reprinting a century later. Every fact, dimension and image in this record refers to accession 18.64(43) alone. Where the later Metropolitan impression appears in the image gallery below, it is labelled as what it is: a different, later pull from the same plate, not the object described here.

This impression's own history

What can be said with confidence about accession 18.64(43) specifically is limited. It is one sheet of a complete eighty-plate set that the Metropolitan's own records identify as the first edition, and the set came to the museum as a gift from the New York dealer M. Knoedler and Co. in 1918. Where the set was between 1799 and its appearance in Knoedler's hands is not documented in the sources consulted for this record. It is not established here, and should not be assumed, whether this set was one of the 27 sold from the Calle del Desengano shop before the February 1799 withdrawal, or reached the market by some later channel; the two are not the same claim, and only the first would place this specific set inside the documented two-week sale.

What is documented is the accession itself, and the museum's own classification of the set as complete and first-edition, a classification this record treats as authoritative pending any published Metropolitan curatorial file that says otherwise.

What it cost, and what comparable sets have made since

320 reales for the eighty-print set in 1799 was, by contemporary account, roughly the price of an ounce of gold - a luxury purchase, not an impulse buy, and one aimed by its retail venue and price at a wealthy or professional buyer rather than a popular audience. No source consulted for this record offers a defensible period-wage or retail-price-index conversion of that figure into modern currency, and this record is not supplying one rather than quoting an unsourced round number.

Complete first-edition sets in original condition are now rare and valuable as a class. A complete first-edition set in a contemporary Spanish binding, from the Josefowitz collection, sold at Christie's, New York, on 28 January 2014, for 1,445,000 US dollars; the source consulted for this figure did not distinguish the hammer price from the buyer's premium, and that distinction should be confirmed against Christie's own sale record before this figure is used for valuation purposes. The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, acquired a complete bound first-edition set through the Gow Fund in 1986. The British Museum's holdings of the series descend through the Tomas Harris collection, catalogued by Juliet Wilson-Bareau. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, built its Goya print holdings under the curator Eleanor A. Sayre, who co-directed, with Alfonso E. Perez Sanchez, the 1988-89 exhibition Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment, shown at the Museo del Prado, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art itself - the institution that holds the sheet described in this record.