Asta su Abuelo (And so was his grandfather),

1799

Between May 1796 and April 1797, Goya visited the Andalusian estate of the recently widowed Duchess of Alba, famous as one of the most fashionable and beautiful young women in the Spanish court. That year he filled two sketchbooks with fanciful allegorical drawings in which he contemplated the foolish hypocrisies of Spanish society. Masterfully rendered in brush and gray wash and annotated with brief satirical comments, these drawings were to become the source material for the artist’s celebrated set of eighty aquatints entitled Los Caprichios. Goya’s international reputation as an artist of enormous wit and dark imagination was largely based on the circulation of these prints, first printed and sold in book form in 1799.
Goya’s somber self-portrait, inscribed with his name and occupation as on a calling card, acts as the frontispiece of Los Caprichos. Halfway through the series, Goya includes six plates depicting donkeys as humans, a literary device popular in eighteenth-century Spanish literature. In plate 39, a pretentious aristocrat is portrayed as an ass studying his genealogical lineage.