Francisco de Goya (b. 1746, Fuentedetodos)

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters 

1799, etching, aquatint. Sheet 29.5 x 21 cm; plate 21.4 x 15.1 cm.

Inscribed lower left: El sueño / de la razon / produce / monstruous. Numbered upper right: 43.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, marked as public domain.

Depicting a man asleep at his desk surrounded by owls, bats and a wild cat, this print and its caption evokes a world in which reason is being abandoned. Will he fall victim to these awful creatures, or will he wake in time to banish their memory? The print is from Los Caprichos, a series condemning stupidity and superstition at a time of terrible poverty and social unrest in Spain and bloody revolutions in France, America, Haiti and Latin America. It was also a time when the rational thinking prized by the European Enlightenment gave way to Romanticism, an anti-rationalist artistic movement often inspired by dreams and nightmares. Goya clearly sensed the dangers in this, inscribing one copy of the print with the words “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of all arts and the source of their wonders.”