Blind Singer

Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This is one of four etchings closely related to drawings Goya made in Bordeaux. Here, a blind man sits in the foreground playing the guitar and singing. The contorted faces of his audience can hardly be made out in the background, because the aquatint has been darkened by cross-hatching in etching. Goya had explored the subject of a blind musician and his audience in a design for a tapestry, reproduced in an early etching on view in the first gallery of this exhibition. But the attractive passersby of that scene have been replaced here by demonic faces emerging from a dark background.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art