Goya's War: Los Desastres de la Guerra

This book, published to accompany an exhibition of the same name, examines Goya’s series of eighty aquatint etchings, Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War) within the context of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain and the ensuing restoration of the Spanish government (1808-14). This series of aquatint etchings was published thirty-five years after Goya’s death, following a sequence created several years after the plates were etched. In this book, Goya scholar Janis Tomlinson proposes an alternative order that both reflects the chronology of Goya’s creation of these images, corroborated by his changing style, subjects and materials, and illustrates their relation to the historical events that inspired them. The enduring power of these prints for contemporary artists is the subject of an essay by Kathleen Stewart Howe.