One of Spain’s greatest artists, Francisco de Goya is famous for documenting the dark underside of a country ravaged by conflict. While his earlier works included royal portraits and biting satirical caricatures, his later works explored somber themes such as the horrors of war and disease. After a traumatic illness in 1792 left the artist completely deaf, Goya’s work took a turn for the macabre and the bizarre, realms which inspired great creativity and technical skill in him. This painting was created during a time of particularly great political and personal upheaval in the artist’s life. Goya’s home country of Spain was in a brutal war with France, and his beloved wife of thirty-nine years was also dying. During the most violent years of the war (1808–14), the artist worked increasingly in solitude, creating private works that were intended primarily for his own use. These included many masterpieces about the war as well as his haunting still-life paintings, most notably a series depicting dead animals. This painting from the aforementioned series reflects the solemn circumstances of this dark period in the artist’s life.
Illuminated by moonlight and surrounded by the echoes of waves crashing in the background, Still Life with Golden Bream portrays the bodies of six wet, scaly fish piled on a darkened beach. Silver flesh and thick, yellow eyes reflect a ghostly light, which lends an eerie and mysterious feel to the scene. Goya uses a unique composition, vibrant brushwork, and optical illusion to recreate the effects of death and the process of dying on the canvas.
The heap of glistening fish is placed prominently in the center of the painting. Goya stacked and foreshortened (to make something look like it has depth by painting it shorter and in the foreground) the fish in order to create an unstable and unnerving arrangement of bodies. Unorthodox color and paint application further enhance this compelling image. Careful examination reveals Goya’s method of painting the fish. He began by rubbing light brownish and bluish-gray pigments onto the canvas, and then highlighted the underbellies of the fish with a brush heavily loaded with white paint. The details of the gills appear to have been achieved with both a brush and a palette knife. Goya added a yellowish glaze to areas of the composition, as well as accents of red along the gills and mouths of the fish. Although Goya uses the same color and technique to depict the carcasses of each fish, he captures individual characteristics as well.
Goya´s purpose for presenting the pile of fish is ambiguous. There are no fishermen around and no nets to be seen in the painting. The fish are unsteadily stacked on top of one another, each a part of a meaningless heap. Goya´s dramatic circular strokes, consisting of jarring yellow paint outlined in deep red, give the eye of the fish a pulsing, bulging quality, a hint of its very recent life. Yet Goya rendered the fish with great poignancy, symbolically linking their demise with the terrible human slaughter that resulted from Spain’s conflict with France. Despite Goya’s productive career, he painted only about a dozen still-life paintings and none until he was 60 years old. Although the subject of this work is simple—a pile of dead fish—it expresses a gloom reminiscent of Goya´s etching series Disasters of War, which, like this still life, illustrated the atrocities committed by both the French and the Spanish in war and expressed through its somber tone the artist’s detestation of violence.
