The dark dreams of Goya’s witches

By Marion Coutts

Twenty-three of the most extraordinary images you might wish for are on show at the Courtauld in London. You might wish for them, but you would scarcely be able to imagine them for yourself. The show recreates for the first time the sequence of drawings from “The Witches and Old Women Album”, or “Album D”—one of eight, late albums Goya drew for private consumption between 1819 and 1823. These were drawings made for himself and a group of friends. All market pressures were off, and the liberation is palpable. He could do exactly what he liked.

In “Singing and Dancing”, an old woman levitates while playing the guitar. Her mouth is a discordant O, set in a yowl. Her skirts balloon around her legs. It’s clear she stinks, as directly beneath her sits another old crone holding her nose and eyeing up her skirt with malevolent glee. This is the only drawing the Courtauld owns and it started off the paper trail to reunite the sequence. It is so peculiar, you can see why. The first four images are flyers: people fly, fall, they go up, they go down. “Mirth” has two airborne ancients locked weightlessly together, playing castanets and gurning at each other. Goya works here the themes he had been working all his life: witchcraft, superstition, cruelty, music, death, dreams.