'Merry Folly' from the 'Disparates' (Follies / Irrationalities)

Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Three men and three women, all dressed in the popular fashion of majos and majas, dance in a circle while playing castanets, in an image that evokes the Spanish saying "merry like a pair of castanets." The odd pairing of the three old men—two balding and corpulent and a hunchbacked third leaping at left—with three overdressed and buxom young women signals that Goya’s depiction of merriment here is a parody. Their mismatch alludes to the theme of mutual deception in relationships between men and women that Goya explored throughout his work. From the posthumous first edition published by the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid in 1864 under the title 'Los Proverbios'.

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