Francisco Goya Art Prints

Born in Fuendetodos in Aragon, the son of a gilder, he failed twice to get into Madrid's Royal Academy and paid his own way to Rome instead. Back in Spain he spent five years on some 42 of these full-size designs, known as cartoons. The Parasol is one of them, painted when the future queen asked for cheerful scenes for her dining room: a young woman in French dress rests on the ground with a fan in her hand.

Court painter from 1786, he painted the Spanish aristocracy without much flattery. His gentler side shows in the Met's "Red Boy", a small son of the Count of Altamira in red clothes among his pet birds and cats. His Duchess of Alba (1795) is built mostly from red and white. La maja desnuda, a life-size nude with no mythological excuse, was never shown in public in his lifetime and was seized by the Inquisition as obscene.

An undiagnosed illness around 1793 left him deaf, and his work turned inward and darker. During the French occupation he stayed in Madrid, and in 1814 painted The Third of May 1808, commissioned at his own suggestion to mark Spanish resistance to Napoleon's armies. In The Forge, look for the blazing red of hot metal against a room of greys, blues and black.

At about 75, living almost alone outside Madrid, he painted the fourteen Black Paintings, including Witches' Sabbath, where Satan looms as a goat over a coven of terrified old women. One caution: they were later peeled from the plaster onto canvas and much altered, with extensive loss of paint. In the same years he painted Self-Portrait with Dr Arrieta (1820), a thank-you to the doctor who nursed him through a dangerous illness: Goya clutches his red bed-sheet while Arrieta holds a glass to his lips. He left Spain for Bordeaux in 1824 and died there in 1828.