This first group of 16 drawings is a foretaste of what we will see later.

As you can see here, Goya was interested in people and what happened to them. And this was so from when he started to draw in 1770 when he lived in Madrid and worked at the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Bárbara, until he died in Bordeaux, France. For that reason, all the drawings you will see show people in different situations. Sometimes what he drew was real, but other times it was the product of his imagination. On other occasions, he mixed reality with fantasy to express in his sketchbooks how he felt about what was happening.

Look closely at Goya’s drawings and try to discover the emotions he felt when he saw scenes around him that he then sketched. Based on how he drew, the colours he used and the letters he sometimes wrote, can you guess if he agreed or disagreed with the things that were going on at that time?