Goya: Deaf at 46, 36 Years of Silence, Saturn on His Dining Room Wall, Died Bordeaux 1828

Last updated: May 2026 · By Stanislav Arnautov · Berlin

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) is the most dramatically bifurcated major artist in Western art history: the first half of his career, a brilliantly successful court painter and portraitist for the Spanish royal family and aristocracy; the second half (from 1792 onward), a deaf recluse producing the most psychologically extreme and most visually violent art in the Spanish tradition. The deafness is the hinge between the two Goyas. Before the deafness: Tapestry cartoons, royal portraits, aristocratic commissions. After: The Disasters of War, the Saturn, the Black Paintings on the walls of his own house. He died in Bordeaux in 1828, aged 82, in exile, having spent 36 years in total silence. At the Museo del Prado, Madrid. DeckArts Berlin from ~$230.

Early Life and the Court of Charles IV

Francisco Goya was born on 30 March 1746 in Fuendetodos, a small village in Aragon, approximately 45 km south of Zaragoza. His father, José Benito de Goya, was a master gilder from Zaragoza; his mother, Gracia Lucientes, came from a family of minor Aragonese nobility. The family moved to Zaragoza when Francisco was still an infant. He was apprenticed to the Zaragoza painter José Lúzaro in approximately 1759, at approximately age 14, and studied under him for approximately four years. He subsequently made two failed attempts to win the first prize at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid (in 1763 and 1766) before travelling to Italy in 1769–1771, where he studied the Italian tradition in Rome and Parma.

Goya’s breakthrough into the Spanish court came through his brother-in-law Francisco Bayeu, an established Madrid court painter who introduced Goya to the royal tapestry workshop’s commission structure. Between 1775 and 1792, Goya produced 63 tapestry cartoons (full-size preparatory paintings on canvas that were reproduced in tapestry for the royal palaces’ interior decoration). The tapestry cartoons’ subjects: scenes from contemporary Spanish popular life — hunters, picnics, parasol games, swings, carnivals — in the light, elegant style of the Rococo period. They are entirely different in character from the work that would follow the deafness: warm, brightly lit, populated by fashionably dressed figures in sunny outdoor settings. If these cartoons and the Black Paintings were by the same artist, the biographical discontinuity created by the deafness would seem implausible.

In 1786, Goya was appointed Painter to the King (Pintor del Rey) under Charles III. In 1789, he was appointed First Court Painter (Primer Pintor de Cámara) under Charles IV — the highest official painting appointment in Spain. His portraits of Charles IV and the Spanish royal family are the most psychologically penetrating royal portraits in the Western tradition: he depicted Charles IV and his family without idealization, with a direct realism that Aldous Huxley later described as “an act of monstrous insolence.” They are not flattering; they are ruthlessly specific. Charles IV was apparently unaware of or unconcerned by their specific unflattering quality — he continued to commission Goya for twenty years.

The Deafness of 1792: The Silence That Changed Everything

In the winter of 1792–1793, while visiting his friend and patron Sebastián Martínez in Cádiz, Goya fell severely ill. The nature of the illness is not definitively established in the surviving medical records; the documented symptoms — tinnitus, dizziness, partial vision loss, and total deafness — are consistent with multiple possible causes including a brainstem cerebrovascular event, a severe viral infection (possibly typhus), autoimmune hearing loss (Meniere’s disease or similar), or lead poisoning from chronic exposure to heavy-metal-containing pigments. Modern scholarly opinion is divided among these possible causes without consensus.

What is documented: Goya was almost completely deaf from the winter of 1792–1793 until his death in 1828 — 36 years of total or near-total deafness. He was 46–47 years old when the deafness began. He had 35–36 more years to live. In those 36 years, he would produce the Disasters of War, the Saturn, the Pinturas Negras (Black Paintings), and the most psychologically extreme body of work in the Spanish tradition.

The deafness’s biographical significance: it did not end his career — it transformed it. The man who lost his hearing at 46 and had 36 years to respond to that loss produced, in those 36 years, the most specifically modern and most psychologically penetrating art of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The silent years are not the lesser years; they are the years in which Goya became the painter who interested every subsequent generation of artists (Delacroix, Manet, Picasso, Francis Bacon). The court painter died in 1792; the modern artist was born in the same illness.

The Disasters of War: Goya’s Document of Atrocity

The Peninsular War (1808–1814) — the conflict between Napoleon’s occupying forces and Spanish resistance — produced the most sustained and most specific atrocity documentation in the history of graphic art: Francisco Goya’s series of 82 aquatint prints known as The Disasters of War (Los Desastres de la Guerra), made approximately 1810–1820 and first published posthumously in 1863, 35 years after Goya’s death.

The series depicts: French soldiers executing Spanish civilians (the firing squad scenes that directly influenced Manet’s Execution of Emperor Maximilian and Picasso’s Massacre in Korea); Spanish guerrillas murdering French soldiers; civilian starvation in Madrid; bodies mutilated and displayed on trees; and the allegorical final plates that depict truth, justice, and reason as dead or endangered figures. The series was not exhibited during Goya’s lifetime and was not published during his lifetime. It was made as a private document of what he witnessed or knew of the war’s specific human costs.

Plate 39 (“Grande hazana! Con muertos!” — “Great deeds! Against the dead!”) is the most specifically violent print in the series: a tree on which several human bodies — decapitated, dismembered, impaled — are displayed. The print’s specific quality: it depicts something that actually happened, repeatedly, during the Peninsular War. It is not an allegory; it is a record. The bodies are on the tree; someone put them there; this is what war produces. Goya made 81 more prints in the same series. He never published them. See: Prado Madrid — Goya.

The Quinta del Sordo: The House of the Deaf Man

In 1819, at the age of 73, Goya purchased a two-story country house on the outskirts of Madrid, on the south bank of the Manzanares river. The house’s name — Quinta del Sordo, “the House of the Deaf Man” — was not given by Goya; it was the house’s pre-existing popular name, apparently because a previous deaf occupant had lived there before Goya’s purchase. Goya was not the first deaf person to live in the Quinta del Sordo, but he was the one who made it its defining name.

Goya moved into the Quinta del Sordo in early 1819 with his companion Leocadia Zórrita (also written Leocadia Weiss, from her husband’s name), a young woman approximately 40 years younger than Goya who had separated from her husband and who managed the Quinta del Sordo household during Goya’s residence there. Their relationship — its exact nature is not documented — produced a child, Rosario Weiss (born 1814), whom Goya treated with particular affection in his last years and who later became an artist herself.

Between approximately 1819 and 1823, Goya painted the walls of the Quinta del Sordo’s lower and upper floors with 14 large-scale oil paintings directly on the plaster — the works known as the Pinturas Negras (Black Paintings). He worked on these paintings without any commission, any patron, any stated purpose, and any known intention to exhibit them. They were for himself. They were on his walls. He ate his meals in the room below the Saturn.

The Black Paintings: 14 Works Never Meant to Be Seen

The Pinturas Negras (Black Paintings) are 14 paintings executed in oil directly on the plaster walls of the Quinta del Sordo’s lower floor (6 paintings) and upper floor (8 paintings), made approximately 1819–1823. They are: Saturn Devouring His Son; Judith and Holofernes; The Witches’ Sabbath (Aquelarre); The Pilgrimage of San Isidro; Two Old Men Eating; The Dog; A Man Mocked by Two Women; Asmodeus (Fantastic Vision); Fight with Cudgels (Duelo a garrotazos); Three Fates (Atropos); Reading (Men Reading); Men Laughing; Saturn (sometimes distinguished from Saturn Devouring as a different work); and The Leocadia.

Five specific biographical facts about the Black Paintings that most people who discuss them do not know:

1. They were never titled by Goya. None of the 14 Black Paintings has a title given by Goya himself. The titles (“Saturn Devouring His Son”, “The Witches’ Sabbath”, “Fight with Cudgels”) were assigned after his death, mostly by the art historian Antonio Brugada, who made an inventory of the Quinta del Sordo’s contents in 1828 and gave descriptive names to each composition. Goya’s specific intentions for each work, their specific iconographic programmes, and their relationship to each other are all undocumented.

2. They were never exhibited during Goya’s lifetime. Goya painted them on his walls, lived with them, and left them there when he went into exile in Bordeaux in 1824. They were not exhibited during his lifetime or during the subsequent decades. The Quinta del Sordo passed to Goya’s grandson Mariano Goya after Goya’s death, and subsequently to a Belgian banker, Frédéric Emile d’Erlanger, who in 1874 had the paintings transferred from the plaster walls to canvas. The transferred works were exhibited at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1878 (50 years after Goya’s death) and donated to the Museo del Prado by d’Erlanger in 1881. The Prado has held them since 1881.

3. They were painted by a 73–77 year old. When Goya began the Black Paintings c.1819, he was approximately 73 years old. When he finished (c.1823), he was approximately 77. He had been deaf for 27–31 years at the time. The Black Paintings are not a young artist’s extremism; they are an old man’s interior world, made on the walls of his own house, for no one. This is the most specifically biographical element of the Black Paintings’ programme: the age and the solitude.

4. Saturn was on the dining room’s lower wall. The Saturn Devouring His Son was on the lower floor’s dining room wall, at a height that Goya saw while eating his meals. This is not a hypothetical biographical reading; this is the documented position of the painting in the house. He ate below the Saturn. Every meal in his own house, for the years he lived at the Quinta del Sordo, was eaten below the image of the god consuming his own child.

5. The Black Paintings may have been modified after Goya’s death. Technical analysis of the transferred paintings — X-ray examination and pigment analysis conducted by the Prado in the 20th century — has revealed that several of the Black Paintings, including the Saturn, show evidence of significant overpainting, possibly after Goya’s death or during the transfer process. The specific extent and nature of the modifications is debated; the current scholarly position is that the paintings are substantially Goya’s original work with possible post-mortem alterations to some details.

Saturn Devouring His Son: On the Dining Room Wall

Saturn Devouring His Son (Saturno devorando a su hijo, c.1819–1823) is the most celebrated and most disturbing of the Black Paintings. In a composition of approximately 143.5 × 81.4 cm (original wall dimensions before transfer), it depicts Saturn (Kronos) — the Titan who in Greek mythology ate his children to prevent the prophecy that he would be overthrown by one of them — in the act of consuming a human figure. The figure is an adult-sized man’s body, not an infant as in the classical iconographic convention (Rubens’ 1636 version depicts an infant); Goya’s Saturn is consuming an adult.

The specific visual quality of the Saturn: the god’s eyes are enormous, wild, and frantic — the specific expression of terror-driven consumption rather than deliberate power. Saturn is not triumphant; he is panicked. The eyes’ white irises expanding from the dark background are the composition’s defining visual event. The hands grip the body with a specific convulsive force. The composition’s dark ground provides almost no spatial context — Saturn emerges from near-absolute dark as a frantic, panicked figure, the body disappearing into him from the right side of the composition.

The painting’s iconographic programme and Goya’s specific intention are undocumented. The most specific biographical interpretation: a 73–77 year old deaf man, alone in a house outside Madrid, painting the Roman/Greek myth of a father consuming his children on his own dining room wall. He ate below this image. Whatever it meant to Goya — a meditation on mortality, on political power consuming the people it is supposed to protect, on the self’s consumption of its own future, on the specific experience of aging and losing everything, or on something entirely personal and undocumented — remains permanently open. See: Prado Madrid — Saturn Devouring His Son. View Saturn Diptych at DeckArts →

Bordeaux 1824–1828: Exile and the Last Works

In June 1824, at the age of 78, Goya left Madrid for Bordeaux, France. The departure was effectively an exile: Fernando VII’s absolutist restoration in 1823 had reversed the liberal constitutional gains of the preceding decade, and Goya — who had documented the Napoleonic atrocities but had also briefly served the Joseph Bonaparte administration and was associated with the liberal intelligentsia — was in an ambiguous and potentially dangerous political position. He applied to Fernando VII’s court for permission to travel for health reasons (“to take the mineral waters”) and received it. He never returned to Spain.

In Bordeaux (1824–1828), the last four years of his life, Goya produced the miniatures on ivory that are among the most technically innovative works of his late period: tiny portrait-scale paintings in oil on ivory, using a technique of his own invention (washing ink over the ivory surface and working back into it). He also produced a series of lithographs (the Bordeaux Bulls series, 1825) that are among the finest and most spontaneous lithographs of the early 19th century. He was 78–82 years old, deaf, and in a foreign country; he was making some of the most technically inventive work of his career.

Goya died in Bordeaux on 16 April 1828, aged 82. He had been in Spain’s service as a court painter for approximately 40 years, from his appointment to Charles III’s service in the 1780s until Fernando VII’s court formally ended his pension in the early 1820s. He had been deaf for 36 of those years. His body was initially buried in Bordeaux; it was repatriated to Spain in 1899 and is now buried in the Real Ermita de San Antonio de la Florida in Madrid, beneath the ceiling he had frescoed in 1798 — buried in the frescoed church he himself had decorated, beneath his own work. See: Goya Saturn: The Dining Room Wall.

Goya’s Legacy: From Court Painter to the Father of Modern Art

Goya’s critical and art-historical legacy has been the subject of sustained analysis since his death. The specific claim most widely made: that Goya is “the father of modern art,” or at least a founding figure of the modernist tradition in painting. The evidence for this claim:

Delacroix: Goya’s use of loose, gestural paint application, his willingness to leave marks visible as marks rather than blending them into an illusionistic surface, and his specific engagement with the psychological and political content of his subjects are directly cited by Delacroix as formative influences on his own practice.

Manet: The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1867–1868) is a direct visual quotation of Goya’s Third of May 1808 (1814): the firing squad, the kneeling figure in white, the massed soldiers at close range. Manet had access to prints of the Third of May and acknowledged Goya’s influence on the composition.

Picasso: Guernica (1937) — the most celebrated anti-war painting of the 20th century — inherits its specific visual programme (the screaming faces, the dismembered bodies, the overwhelming dark ground, the specific quality of violence as psychological horror rather than physical spectacle) directly from Goya’s Disasters of War and from the Black Paintings.

Francis Bacon: Bacon’s screaming popes and contorted figures in paint-spattered dark grounds are the most direct 20th-century continuation of the specific visual language that Goya developed in the Black Paintings: the isolated figure in near-absolute dark, contorted by internal psychological pressure rather than external physical force.

Goya for Home Decor

Goya’s domestic art programme is the most specific and most psychologically extreme in the DeckArts range. The Saturn diptych and the Bosch Hell Panel are the two pieces that generate the most intense and most polarised guest responses: the Saturn either immediately and permanently rewards the occupant who values psychological depth and biographical extremity, or it is the wrong piece for the room. There is no neutral response to the Saturn above the dining room table.

Saturn diptych (~$230) on near-black or forest green: The most specifically Goya-biographical domestic installation: near-absolute dark ground + warm panicked flesh advancing from the dark under 2700K. Above the dining room table or above the primary living room sofa on near-black. The dining room context is the most biographically specific: Goya ate below the Saturn. To eat below the Saturn in your own dining room is to recreate, in domestic scale, the specific biographical experience of the artist who painted it on his own wall. View Saturn Diptych →

Best wall colours for Goya: Near-black (the most dramatically focused) or forest green (warm flesh from organic dark). Warm charcoal (neutral dark, maximum compositional clarity). Never warm white (the white wall’s light compromises the Saturn’s specific visual programme of warm flesh from absolute dark).

Best positions for Goya: Above the dining table (the most biographically specific position); above the primary sofa wall in a dark academic living room; above a library or study room’s secondary wall as a psychologically intense accent. See: Best Art for Dark Rooms 2026.

Four Complete Goya Programmes

Programme 1: The Goya Dining Room (~$230)
Near-black dining room walls (F&B Off-Black or similar) + Saturn diptych (~$230) at 155–165 cm above or beside the dining table + directed 2700K warm LED track spot on the diptych (tight beam, separate dimmer) + beeswax pillar candle on the dining table + dark wood dining chairs. “Goya ate below this image every day for years. He was 73 years old. He had been deaf for 27 years. He painted it on his own wall, for no one.” The most biographically specific dining room dark programme available. Total art: ~$230.

Programme 2: The Baroque Dark Living Room (~$370)
Forest green primary sofa wall + Saturn diptych (~$230) at 155–165 cm above the sofa + Medusa single (~$140) on the adjacent wall or at the entrance door + directed 2700K warm LED spots on both. The two most psychologically extreme dark room programmes at DeckArts: the Goya who was deaf for 36 years and ate below the Saturn + the Caravaggio who killed a man in 1606 and died at the edge of the Mediterranean at 38–39. Total art: ~$370.

Programme 3: The Dark Academia Library With Goya (~$590)
Forest green all walls + Night Watch triptych (~$310) on the primary library wall at 155–165 cm + Saturn diptych (~$230) on the secondary library wall at 155–165 cm + directed 2700K spots on both + aged brass desk lamp + beeswax candles. The most eventful painting in Western art (Night Watch, three attacks) + the most psychologically extreme private painting programme in Spanish art (Saturn, Quinta del Sordo, 36 years deaf). Total art: ~$540. See: Wall Art for a Home Library 2026.

Programme 4: The Complete Darkness (~$370)
Near-black all living room walls + Saturn diptych (~$230) above the primary sofa at 155–165 cm + Bosch Hell Panel single (~$140) at the entrance door (the Hell panel’s musical instruments and the tree-man self-portrait at the threshold) + directed 2700K warm LED spots + beeswax candles. The most psychologically extreme two-piece dark room programme: Goya’s private dining room meditation + Bosch’s self-portrait inside Hell. Total art: ~$370.

FAQ

Who was Francisco Goya?

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (30 March 1746 – 16 April 1828) was a Spanish painter who was born in Fuendetodos, Aragon, trained in Zaragoza and Rome, and became First Court Painter (Primer Pintor de Cámara) to Charles IV of Spain in 1789. He went deaf in 1792 at age 46 and spent the remaining 36 years of his life in silence. His post-deafness work includes: the Disasters of War (82 prints, c.1810–1820, documenting Napoleonic atrocity); the Saturn Devouring His Son (c.1819–1823, painted on his own dining room wall); and 13 other Black Paintings painted directly on the plaster walls of his house (Quinta del Sordo) near Madrid. He died in Bordeaux in 1828, aged 82, in exile. At the Prado Madrid. DeckArts Saturn diptych from ~$230.

Why did Goya paint Saturn on his dining room wall?

The specific biographical question has never been answered, because no documentation of Goya’s intentions for the Black Paintings survives — he never titled them, never exhibited them, never discussed them in any surviving letter or interview. The most specific biographical context: a 73-year-old deaf man, alone in a house outside Madrid with his much younger companion Leocadia, painted the myth of a father consuming his own children on the wall of the room where he ate his meals. Whatever it meant — a meditation on mortality, political power consuming the people, self-consumption, the specific terror of old age, or something entirely personal — remains permanently open, as open as the Bosch Garden’s programme has been for 500 years. The Prado has held the painting since 1881; it has been on public display for 145 years and no one has found the documentation. View Saturn Diptych →. DeckArts from ~$230.

What were the Black Paintings?

14 oil paintings applied directly to the plaster walls of Goya’s house (Quinta del Sordo) near Madrid, c.1819–1823. Never titled by Goya. Never exhibited during his lifetime. Made for no commission, no patron, no stated purpose. The most specific material fact: they were painted on walls — not on canvas, not for transport, not for sale. They were for himself, in his house. He left them there when he went into exile in Bordeaux in 1824. Transferred to canvas in 1874 by Frédéric Emile d’Erlanger, exhibited at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1878, donated to the Prado in 1881. Technical analysis suggests some works may have been modified during or after the transfer process. See: Prado Madrid — Goya Black Paintings. DeckArts Saturn diptych from ~$230.

What wall colour goes with Goya’s Saturn?

Near-black (F&B Off-Black, Railings, Hague Blue in its darkest application) or forest green (F&B Calke Green, Little Greene Sage in its darker applications). The Saturn’s specific visual programme — warm panicked flesh advancing from near-absolute dark — requires a dark wall ground: the wall’s dark extends and reinforces the composition’s own absolute dark ground, creating a single dark field from which the warm flesh advances at maximum warm-cool contrast under a directed 2700K warm LED spot. Never on warm white: the white wall’s ambient light compromises the advance from dark that the composition is designed around. See: Best Art for Dark Rooms 2026. DeckArts Saturn diptych from ~$230.

Article Summary

Francisco Goya (1746–1828) is the most dramatically bifurcated major artist in Western art history — the deafness of 1792 (age 46) is the biographical hinge between the successful Rococo court painter and the psychologically extreme modern artist. Eight specific biographical facts: (1) born Fuendetodos, Aragon, 1746; father a gold engraver; (2) appointed First Court Painter (Primer Pintor de Cámara) to Charles IV, 1789; (3) went deaf in the winter of 1792–1793 at age 46; 36 subsequent years of total silence; (4) produced 82 Disasters of War prints c.1810–1820, documenting Napoleonic atrocities; never published during his lifetime; first published 1863, 35 years after his death; (5) purchased the Quinta del Sordo in 1819 at age 73; (6) painted 14 Black Paintings directly on the plaster walls of the Quinta del Sordo c.1819–1823; never titled, never exhibited, never discussed in any surviving document; (7) the Saturn was on the dining room’s lower wall; he ate below it; (8) died in Bordeaux in exile, 16 April 1828, aged 82; reburied in Madrid in 1899 beneath the ceiling he had himself frescoed in 1798. Goya’s influence: Delacroix (gestural mark), Manet (Third of May as Execution of Maximilian), Picasso (Guernica’s screaming violence), Francis Bacon (isolated figure in dark). DeckArts Saturn diptych (~$230): on near-black or forest green, above the dining table or primary sofa wall, directed 2700K warm LED spot mandatory. Ships from Berlin. 30-day return.

About the Author

Stanislav Arnautov is the founder of DeckArts and a creative director from Ukraine based in Berlin.

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