From the Hermit's correspondence:
As background information for a piece I'm working on, I looked into my copy of The Complete Etchings of Goya, foreword by Aldous Huxley and a standard tome that I now have in my personal library, thanks to the terrific and wide-ranging Pedro: he acquired it as one of his secondhand book bargains and brought it as a gift (magnificent!) on one of his visits. One of the four series presented in the book is Los Desastres de la Guerra, the Disasters of War. The war in question is the 1808 French invasion of Spain by Napoleon's forces.
Since you and I have recently pursued lots of reading about the Napoleonic wars, especially Wellington's Peninsular campaign, as part of the Sharpe and the Aubrey/Maturin series, as well as through nonfiction historical works, I now found myself in a position to view and understand the etchings as I had not been able to earlier: I now comprehended their historical context.
Huxley reminds us that Goya had always been a close observer of the Spanish scene of all castes and types. He had most recently published a series of etchings, the Capriccios, when he was in his fifties, in 1799. In 1808 the war -- invasion -- came. Between the ages of 65 and 75 he created the 83 etchings in the Desastres. From firsthand knowledge.
While the books we've read are necessary to give an understanding of the backgrounds, ins and outs of the battles and warfare of Napoleonic times -- as you and I have discussed, actually the first of the World Wars, affecting areas far away from Europe -- those books cannot give a real idea of the horrors of that (or any) war. They are not meant to, and also they cannot convey it. The Desastres can, and do. In fact, it may be worth it to go back to some of the books we've read and reread them after seeing the Desastres, this time taking with us pictures of what it's really like when invasion comes.
Aldous Huxley's foreword to the book is short and very much worth reading. How do you introduce great masterworks like Goya's etchings? Huxley explores the idea of a master collection of Late Works from all fields of art. After some brief discussion of what he means by that, and artists and their works who would and would not qualify (this discussion is an education in itself), he points out that all four of the series of etchings of Goya are Late Works, with all that that means.
I urge you strongly to look at the Desastres and read the Huxley foreword. But be warned: war is horrible; and this is the horrors of war with no punches pulled.
8:50:02 AM 
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