Mueller often painted nudes and Gypsy women: in this painting, two semi-nude Gypsy women in a humble interior setting are accompanied by the inevitable cat--companion of fortune-tellers and necromantic seances--that is visible in silhouette on the windowsill.
On a summer's day in 1215 a beleaguered English monarch met a group of disgruntled barons in a meadow by the river Thames named Runnymede. Beset by foreign crisis and domestic rebellion, King John was fast running out of options. On June 15 he reluctantly agreed to fix his regal seal to a document that would change the world. A milestone in the development of constitutional politics and the rule of law, the "Great Charter" established an Englishman's right to Habeas Corpus and set limits to the exercise of royal power. For the first time a group of subjects had forced an English king to agree to a document that limited his powers by law and protected their rights.
“When the chronicler Matthew Paris reflected on the fate of John’s soul twenty years after his death, he famously declared that “England reeks with John’s filthy deeds; the foulness of Hell is defiled by John.”
Los Caprichos are a set of 80 prints in aquatint and etching created by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya in 1797 and 1798, and published as an album in 1799. The prints were an artistic experiment: a medium for Goya's condemnation of the universal follies and foolishness in the Spanish society in which he lived.
The criticisms are far-ranging and acidic; he speaks against the predominance of superstition, the ignorance and inabilities of the various members of the ruling class, pedagogical short-comings, marital mistakes and the decline of rationality. Some of the prints have anticlerical themes. Goya described the series as depicting "the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance or self-interest have made usual".
The work was an enlightened, tour-de-force critique of 18th-century Spain, and humanity in general. The informal style, as well as the depiction of contemporary society found in Caprichos, makes them (and Goya himself) a precursor to the modernist movement almost a century later. The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters in particular has attained an iconic status.
The other thing that's cool about de Goya y Lucientes' works as I scrolled through them was his imaginative titles, such as The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. The paintings I typically feature here in Cats and Art, and in the art world in general, have always, to me, had very measured and conservative titles.
Next week I'll include a list of some more of his zinger titles, along with links to the works so you can see the subject matter. Here's just one example (unfortunately, sans kitties): Here Comes the Bogey-Man. I just gotta like the bizarre way this guy thought.
