Plate1 from ‘The Disasters of War’ (Los Desastres de la Guerra): Sad foreboding of what is going to happen’. (Tristes presentimientos de lo que ha de acontecer.)

Description

In Sad foreboding of what is going to happen, a man kneels with his arms extended before a dark landscape, his solitary posture making apprehension visible before a specific event is named. Francisco Goya’s Sad Foreboding of What Is Going to Happen gives the figure’s distress a future tense. The scene concentrates on anticipation, allowing an unseen threat to shape the body already.

Made around 1815 and published in 1863, the image opens The Disasters of War as plate 1. Etching, burin and drypoint give the lone figure a substantial presence within the surrounding darkness. Goya begins with an emotional condition rather than a victorious act or explanatory battle scene. Its gravity lies in that uncertainty, where dread is fully present even though the catastrophe remains ahead, making the human response a threshold to the suffering that follows.

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