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Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
FRANCISCO JOSÉ DE GOYA Tal para qual.
Aquatint and etching, circa 1799. 215x150 mm; 8 1/2x6 inches, wide margins. First edition. From Los Caprichos. A brilliant, richly-inked and early impression, with the plate tone from false-biting in the lower left edge and very bright highlights on the woman's fan and shoe, with sharp plate edges and all the different aquatint tones distinct, consistent with the earliest impressions of this subject.
This impression shows the same plate tone at the edges, before the copper plate was polished down, as the impression in the Art Institute of Chicago, illustrated in Sayre, The Changing Image: Prints by Francisco Goya, Boston, 1975.
The main characters of this scene have been identified as Queen María Luisa of Spain and her lover, Prince Manuel Godoy, the Spanish Prime Minister. The sense of Goya's (1746-1828) title Tal para qual, or Two of a Kind, is that both are so corrupt that one deserves the other. Delteil 42; Harris 40.
