The Disasters of War
In 1819, Goya purchased the Quinta del Sordo ("Villa of the Deaf Man") situated on the banks of the Manzanares near Madrid. This small two-story house was named after a previous occupant who had been deaf, though Goya himself, by coincidence, had been functionally deaf for more than two decades, the result of an illness contracted in 1792. At the age of 73, and having survived two life-threatening illnesses, Goya was concerned with his mortality, and increasingly embittered by the conflicts that engulfed Spain in the decade preceding his move to the Quinta del Sordo, and the developing Spanish Civil War of 1820–1823 and the civil strife — indeed, Goya was completing the plates that formed his series "The Disasters of War" during this period.