The Dog (El Perro)

Francisco de Goya

Oil (mixed technique) on plaster, transferred to canvas

Museo del Prado

The Dog, known in Spanish as El Perro or Perro Semihundido, is one of the most arresting works in Western art: a solitary canine head emerges from a dark, sloping mass of earth or sand, its gaze directed upward against an expanse of ochre emptiness. Painted directly onto the walls of his country house, the Quinta del Sordo, between approximately 1820 and 1823, the work belongs to Goya's celebrated series of fourteen Black Paintings—uncommissioned, intensely personal works that he never intended for public display. Francisco de Goya (1746–1828), the great Aragonese master who had served as court painter to the Spanish crown, created these murals in his mid-seventies while deaf, physically diminished, and living in self-imposed isolation amid the political turmoil engulfing Spain. Distinguished by its radical minimalism, its vast negative space, and its mood of existential desolation, The Dog anticipates Symbolism and has been seen by scholars and artists alike as a harbinger of modern art.