The Dog

The Dog (El perro, also called Perro semihundido, the Half-Submerged Dog) is one of the Black Paintings that Francisco Goya painted in oil directly on the walls of his house outside Madrid between 1819 and 1823; transferred to canvas in the 1870s, it is now in the Museo del Prado.

Goya bought the Quinta del Sordo on the banks of the Manzanares in 1819, when he was 73, deaf since an illness in 1792 and having survived two life-threatening illnesses. Over earlier, lighter decorations he painted fourteen uncommissioned, private scenes. The Dog hung on the upper floor, to the left of the door. Like the other murals it had no title from Goya; the names were given by others after his death.

The composition is almost empty. A dark brown slope, darkening toward black as it rises to the right, fills the bottom of the picture, and above it a small dog's head, snout raised and ears back, looks up into a huge field of dirty ochre. A faint dark form above the dog is usually explained as a trace of the earlier painting beneath. Photographs taken by J. Laurent before the transfer show more than is visible now, apparently a large rock and what may be two birds the dog is watching, and in 1909 the Berlin curator Valerian von Loga described the dog as wanting to catch birds. Others see it as sinking or drowning, or as an image of loneliness and futile struggle; the critic Robert Hughes admitted that we do not know what it means, yet its pathos moves us.

The baron Émile d'Erlanger had the murals moved onto canvas by Salvador Martínez Cubells, showed them in Paris in 1878 and gave them to the Spanish state in 1881. The painter Antonio Saura called The Dog the most beautiful picture in the world, and Joan Miró asked to see it, together with Las Meninas, on his last visit to the Prado. The canvas measures 131 × 79 cm.