Throughout his drawings, paintings and prints, Goya returns to one particular subject: men and women on trial, imprisoned, punished, condemned; people who are subjected to judgment and punishment by the legal system, the State, the Inquisition or a mob.

Dr Sarah Symmons, writer and art historian, examines how such persecuted individuals became very real to Goya during the Spanish War of Independence (1808-1814) when collaborators and guerrilla fighters were subjected to summary justice.

After the war, Goya himself was tried by an official ‘process’ and forced to undergo political purification. How did this affect his art? With large oil paintings such as the Second of May and Third of May 1808, Goya asserted his loyalty to the victorious Spanish state, but his more subversive prints, The Disasters of War, suggest something rather different.

Sarah Symmons is a writer and art historian who has published four books about Goya, the most recent being Goya: A Life in Letters (Pimlico, London 2004). She has also published biographies of the British sculptor, John Flaxman, and the French draughtsman and caricaturist, Honoré Daumier, as well as three novels under the pseudonym Natalya Lowndes. She is Reader in Art History at the University of Essex.

Supported by the Consulate General of Spain in Edinburgh and the University of Stirling.

A heroic feat! With dead men! (Grande hazana! Con muertos!), Plate 39 of The Disasters of War by Franciso de Goya