Cleveland Museum of Art
The Horrors of War: What is the Use of a Cup?
Francisco de GoyaLinkedCulture matchlcp-dc200867e871
- Date
- c. 1810–20
- Medium
- etching and aquatint
- Culture
- Spain
- Department
- Prints
- Institution
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Object ID
- 104452
From LinkedCulture
A lone woman holds a small cup over a tangle of dying bodies sprawled across bare ground, and asks, in the image's own caption, "What is the use of a cup?" This is plate 59 from Francisco de Goya's Disasters of War, an etching and aquatint made in Spain around 1810 to 1820. Goya never dared publish the full series of 82 plates in his lifetime, and they remained unseen until 1863, making them one of the earliest sustained artistic reckonings with what war does to ordinary civilians.
Written by LinkedCulture for its video on this object. Machine-generated (claude-sonnet-4-6), not yet reviewed by a person. It is not part of the museum’s record.
What the image shows
A woman and children lying on the ground under a cloudy sky.
Generated by LinkedCulture from the photograph alone, without the museum’s catalogue text (Qwen/Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct), and not yet reviewed by a person. It describes the picture, not the object’s history, and it is not part of the museum’s record.
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Provenance & credit
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- Credit line
- Dudley P. Allen Fund
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