Plate 16 from ‘Los Caprichos’: For heaven’s sake: and it was her mother (Dios la Perdone: Y era su madre)

Description

In For heaven’s sake: and it was her mother, a fashionable woman encounters an older beggar, bringing elegance and poverty into close but uneasy contact. Francisco Goya’s For Heaven’s Sake: And It Was Her Mother gives the meeting a startling personal dimension. The caption makes the distance between the figures more painful, transforming a passing social encounter into a failure of recognition and care.

Plate 16 of Los Caprichos, published in 1799, joins satire to a direct consideration of human responsibility. Etching and burnished aquatint distinguish the contrasting figures without allowing their differences to remain merely picturesque. Goya’s title exposes what appearances conceal: the person asking for help belongs to the younger woman’s own life. The scene’s force comes from that revelation, making social ambition and self-presentation appear especially brittle beside an unacknowledged obligation.

Read our guide to giclée prints or browse the Goya collection.