An old filecard at the Hamburger Kunsthalle's Kupferstichkabinett attributes this drawing to Francisco de Goya, although it does so with a question mark and offers no references that allow us to determine the origin or reasons for that attribution. In his efforts to understand the motives for this labeling while researching the drawing for the present publication, Jens Hoffmann-Samland discussed some of the discoveries that relate formal aspects of this drawing to those of other drawings by Goya. Its poor state of conservation, with tears on the lower right quarter and considerable wear, may reflect an attempt to transfer it to a copper plate. If that were the case, a defective procedure with excessive humidity could have caused the pencil marks to fade. We know of two red-chalk drawings by Goya for engravings of landscapes[1] and, while these differ from the present work in their degrees of precision and nuance, they do bear a certain formal resemblance in aspects such as the depiction of the tree trunk with zigzag strokes or the open ends of its branches, as well as the barely insinuated human figures rendered with short intense strokes of the pencil point and the softly suggested background architecture. The latter, a castle in the mist, could be related to one that Goya drew (Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, D 3916) and later engraved (Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, inv. 45637, sole proof) in his Sueño de la mentira y la inconstancia (Dream of Lies and Fickleness), or in plate number 22 of the Desastres, called Tanto y más (So Much and More). These similarities justify the old attribution of this drawing to Goya's circle, but its poor state of conservation makes a more precise attribution impossible.

José Manuel Matilla


1. Both are at the Museo Nacional del Prado: Paisaje con cascada (Landscape with Waterfall, D 4278) and Paisaje con construcciones y árboles (Landscape with Buildings and Trees, D 4279).

Details zu diesem Werk