In collaboration with the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid on the occasion of its 200th anniversary in 2019, Skira has published an accurate reproduction of Francisco Goya’s (1746-1828) precious Cuaderno C, or Album C in English. Containing more than 100 drawings from the years 1808 to 1820, Cuaderno C covers a wide variety of charged topics, clearly influenced by the events of the Peninsular War and its turbulent aftermath. Goya devoted a large section of the album to drawings that depict prisoners of the Inquisition and their suffering while incarcerated; another section critiques the representation of monastic life, which was secularized in keeping with the French authorities’ orders.

Unlike the first two drawing albums, which were professionally bound with high-quality Dutch paper, Goya made Cuaderno C himself out of the cheaper Spanish paper available to him at the time, making the volume’s survival all the more remarkable. An essay by José Manuel Matilla Rodríguez, art historian and head of the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Museo Nacional del Prado, accompanies the drawings.