Cleveland Museum of Art
They Spruce Themselves Up, Plate 51
Francisco de GoyaLinkedCulture matchlcp-dc200867e871
- Date
- 1799 (printed c. 1855)
- Medium
- etching and aquatint
- Culture
- Spain
- Department
- Prints
- Institution
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Object ID
- 104531
From LinkedCulture
Three bat-winged demons huddle together in a dark, claustrophobic scene, two of them clutching scissors as they groom one another with unsettling care. This is plate 51 from Francisco de Goya's Los Caprichos, an etching and aquatint made in Spain in 1799 and printed around 1855. A sheep-headed figure lurks in the background, completing the grotesque assembly. Goya's genius here is turning something as ordinary as tidying up into a devastating portrait of self-satisfied vanity, suggesting the most monstrous figures are often the ones most proud of their own refinement.
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 man is being attacked by a large, menacing creature with bat-like wings.
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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