Still Life of a Lamb's Head and Flanks (A Butcher's Counter)

Francisco Goya

Oil on canvas

Musée du Louvre

This stark and unflinching still life depicts a severed lamb's head and two flanks of raw meat arranged on a plain surface against a dark background, rendered with visceral directness and a restrained palette of browns, reds, and ochres. Goya employs dramatic chiaroscuro to illuminate the butchered flesh, giving the composition an almost monumental solemnity that departs sharply from the decorative conventions of traditional bodegón painting. Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828), the great Spanish painter and printmaker, produced this work as part of a series of approximately twelve still lifes recorded in the 1812 inventory of his household possessions, coinciding with the Peninsular War and the devastating Madrid famine of 1811–12. The painting is widely recognized as one of the most psychologically charged still lifes in Western art, its imagery of butchered animal remains resonating with the human carnage depicted in Goya's concurrent print series, The Disasters of War.