# Plate 43 from Los Caprichos: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (El sueno de la razon produce monstruos) > Francisco de Goya y Lucientes - Designed and etched 1797-1799; this impression printed and issued in the first edition, Madrid, 1799 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/francisco-goya/goya-los-caprichos-el-sueno-de-la-razon/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-13 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Francisco de Goya y Lucientes - **Date:** Designed and etched 1797-1799; this impression printed and issued in the first edition, Madrid, 1799 - **Medium:** Etching, aquatint, drypoint, and burin on paper - **Dimensions:** Plate 21.2 x 15.1 cm (8 3/8 x 5 15/16 in); sheet 29.5 x 21 cm (11 5/8 x 8 1/4 in) - **Object type:** Print - **Period:** Spanish, late eighteenth century - **Current location:** The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary 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set of the first edition of Francisco Goya's Los Caprichos, printed and offered for sale in Madrid in February 1799 and withdrawn from public sale about two weeks later.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. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **1797-1799** Francisco de Goya `[documented]` (creation) Plate 43 designed and etched by Goya, developed from a 1797 preparatory drawing (Sueno 1 / Ydioma universal, now Museo del Prado) originally intended as the album's opening image under the working title Suenos. - **6 February 1799-c. 20 February 1799** Offered for public sale by Goya `[documented]` (sale and withdrawal) The complete eighty-plate album, this plate among them, advertised in the Diario de Madrid and sold from a perfume and liquor shop at Calle del Desengano 1, Madrid, at 320 reales per set. Sources differ on the exact length of the sale (Goya's own later account says two days; other evidence supports roughly a fortnight); 27 sets are documented as sold before Goya withdrew the remaining stock. - **c. 1799-1803** Francisco de Goya `[documented]` (held stock) Unsold sets and the eighty copper plates remained in Goya's possession. - **1803** Transferred to King Charles IV, via the Real Calcografia `[documented]` (gift in exchange for a royal pension) Goya surrendered the eighty copper plates and 240 unsold printed sets to the Crown, in a letter to the treasury minister Miguel Cayetano Soler, in exchange for a lifetime pension of 12,000 reales a year for his son, Francisco Javier Goya. This transaction concerns the plates and the 240 sets as a body; it does not by itself establish which channel put the Metropolitan's specific set into circulation. - **1803 (or 1799)-1918** Unknown `[unknown]` (gap) No source consulted documents the ownership of the Metropolitan's specific complete first-edition set between the 1799 sale period (if it was one of the 27 sets sold) or the 1803 transfer, and its appearance in the hands of the New York dealer M. Knoedler and Co. by 1918. - **unknown-1918** M. Knoedler and Co., New York `[documented]` (dealer stock) The complete first-edition set was in the hands of the New York art dealership M. Knoedler and Co. by 1918, when it was given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. How or when Knoedler acquired it is not documented in sources consulted. - **1918-present** Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York `[documented]` (gift and accession) Gift of M. Knoedler and Co., 1918. Accessioned as 18.64(1-80), the complete set; this sheet is 18.64(43). Held in the Department of Drawings and Prints. ## Open questions - Was the Metropolitan's set (accession 18.64) one of the 27 sets sold from the Calle del Desengano shop before the February 1799 withdrawal, or did it reach the market by a different, undocumented channel? Not established in the sources consulted. - What became of the roughly 33 sets unaccounted for between an edition usually cited at about 300, the 27 sold in 1799, and the 240 surrendered to the Crown in 1803? No source consulted resolves this gap. - Was Goya ever formally denounced to, or investigated by, the Spanish Inquisition over Los Caprichos? His own 1825 letter to Joaquin Ferrer claims a denunciation; no surviving Inquisition case file has been identified in the sources consulted. - Why does Goya's own 1803 account of the withdrawal (two days) conflict with the roughly fourteen-day timeline supported by other evidence? Whether this is a simple lapse of memory, a deliberate minimisation, or evidence the true withdrawal date is less certain than usually stated is not resolved. - How many official Calcografia editions of Los Caprichos were actually printed between 1799 and 1970? Sources consulted give twelve, thirteen and twenty as the total count, and this record has not been able to determine which is correct. - Between the 1803 transfer and the 1918 Knoedler gift, where was the Metropolitan's specific set of eighty sheets, and through whose hands did it pass? Undocumented in sources consulted. ## Sources - [1] Metropolitan Museum of Art, Collection API record for object 338473, Plate 43 from Los Caprichos (accession 18.64(43)). - [2] Metropolitan Museum of Art, Collection API record for object 333801, The Caprices (Los Caprichos), plates 1-80 (accession 18.64(1-80)), portfolio field: Complete set of the first edition. - [3] Wikimedia Commons, file page for the Metropolitan Museum's digital photograph of accession 18.64(43), donated under the Met's Open Access policy, CC0. - [4] Wikimedia Commons, file page for the Metropolitan Museum's digital photograph of accession 1986.1180.895, dated by the museum '1799, published 1908-1912', CC0. - [5] Wikimedia Commons, file page for the Museo del Prado's photograph of its own impression of Plate 43, described in the file record as first edition (1st ed., Madrid, 1799), public domain. - [6] Wikipedia, 'Los caprichos'. Tertiary source, consolidating the withdrawal timeline, sales figures and 1803 transfer terms. Flagged for replacement with a scholarly monograph (Wilson-Bareau/Gassier or Sayre) or the Prado's own published census of first-edition sets. - [7] Wikipedia, 'The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters'. Tertiary source, consolidating the preparatory drawing's inscription, the frontispiece reordering argument (citing Philip Hofer) and interpretive readings of the image. Flagged for replacement with the cited scholarly literature directly. - [8] Fundacion Goya en Aragon, catalogue entry for El sueno de la razon produce monstruos, including the preparatory drawing's documented provenance (Javier Goya to the Prado, 1886). - [9] National Gallery of Victoria, 'Goya's Caprichos', curatorial essay. - [10] JSTOR Daily (Artstor), 'Goya's Los Caprichos: A magnificent failure', on the 1799 sale, price, retail location and commercial-failure reading of the withdrawal. - [11] InfoGoya, Universidad de Zaragoza, 'Los Caprichos', on the Diario de Madrid announcement and the 1803 transfer. - [12] Fundacion Goya en Aragon, 'La Calcografia Nacional de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando restaurara 228 planchas de Goya' (2022), on the plates' current condition, conservation and the Academy's decision to stop printing from them. - [13] Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, collection highlight page for its complete first-edition, bound set of Los Caprichos, acquired 1986 through the Gow Fund. - [14] Wikimedia Commons, file page for Ydioma universal (the 1797 preparatory drawing), public domain, describing the inscription and the drawing as the basis for the frontispiece-reordering account. - [15] Wikimedia Commons, file page for the Metropolitan Museum's photograph of Plate 1 (Self-portrait), accession 50.558.33, CC0. - [16] Wikimedia Commons, file page for the Metropolitan Museum's photograph of Plate 39 (Asta su abuelo), accession 18.64(39), same 1918 gift as the lead object, CC0. - [17] Wikipedia, 'Eleanor Sayre'. Tertiary source, on Sayre's career and role as Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Flagged for replacement with an MFA Boston primary biographical or obituary source. - [18] Internet Archive, catalogue record for 'Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment' (Alfonso E. Perez Sanchez and Eleanor A. Sayre, codirectors), exhibition catalogue for the Museo del Prado, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988-89. - [19] Aggregated auction-market reporting on the Josefowitz copy of Los Caprichos (complete first-edition set, contemporary Spanish binding), sold Christie's, New York, 28 January 2014, lot 9. The Christie's lot page itself could not be fetched directly for this record; the hammer price and buyer's premium are not distinguished in the sources consulted and should be confirmed against Christie's own record before use. - [20] Wikipedia, 'Francisco Goya'. Tertiary source, for biographical facts: birth, training, court appointments, the 1792-93 illness, later series, the Black Paintings, and death in Bordeaux. Flagged for replacement with a scholarly biography (e.g. Robert Hughes, Goya, or a Prado/Sayre catalogue biography). --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.