Francisco de Goya painted two pictures of the same reclining woman on the same green couch in the same Madrid year — La Maja Desnuda (c. 1797-1800) and La Maja Vestida (c. 1800-05). The two paintings are the first un-mythological reclining nude in the European canon since classical antiquity. They hung in the private cabinet of the Spanish Prime Minister Manuel Godoy on a sliding mechanism that let visitors see either the clothed version or the naked one underneath at the pul

Francisco Goya worked through fifty years of Spanish history, from cheerful tapestry cartoons for the royal palace in 1777 to the Black Paintings he applied directly to the walls of his country house in 1820. Across the same career he was court painter to four successive kings, a witness to the French invasion, a publisher of satirical etchings, a portraitist of the most fashionable women in Madrid, and the inventor of the modern picture of fear.

Francisco Goya's Witches' Sabbath, painted in 1798 for the Duchess of Osuna, shows a circle of women offering their newborn babies to a crowned he-goat under a thin moon. The picture is one of six small witch panels Goya produced in the same year — the same year as the Caprichos etchings — and the moment his work shifts from court portraitist to investigator of fear, ignorance, and the Spanish dark.

El Greco, Zurbaran, Murillo and Ribera defined a century of Spanish painting. Ten works show how they turned deep shadow into faith, poverty, and stillness.

From El Greco's compressed cosmos in late-sixteenth-century Toledo to Antoni Tàpies's matter paintings in late-twentieth-century Barcelona, ten Spanish painters built the visual vocabulary the rest of Europe and the Americas borrowed from. The decisions each one made, and the line between them.

Francisco Goya painted Saturn Devouring His Son between 1819 and 1823, in oil applied directly to the plaster wall of the dining room of his house outside Madrid. He was in his seventies, deaf for thirty years, recovering from a near-fatal illness, and living alone in a country property called the Quinta del Sordo — the House of the Deaf Man. He did not sign the painting. He did not title it. He did not intend it to be seen. Saturn is one of fourteen pictures Goya painted on

Searching for Francisco Goya's The Coven? This is the painting: a Black Painting from 1821-1823, a Devil in goat form presiding over a circle of witches, painted directly onto Goya's own dining-room wall. What the painting shows, why he painted it, and how to bring the fine print home.

A man in a white shirt throws his arms wide before a firing squad on a hill above Madrid. Goya painted the night six years after it happened — and built every modern war painting that came after.

Two Witches' Sabbath paintings, twenty-five years apart. How Francisco Goya used the supernatural to attack the very institutions that fed it.

In the autumn of 1900, Pablo Picasso arrived in Paris. He was nineteen. Within fourteen months his closest friend was dead — and his canvas turned a single colour, the deep exhausted blue that would stay with him for three years.