In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment. – Mary Shelley, 1818

He was surprised to find himself still at his worktable, still in the high-backed chair, yet slumped forward, his face flattened against the sketch he had started working on the day before. The images confused him, and he felt sick.

He often felt sick. Not just in body but in spirit. He was sick of banalities and pretensions. He was sick of things. Sick of lying, sick of recreating lies. Sick of fawning and flattering, though let us be clear: he never fawned or flattered. He solicited work and position but always on his terms. He painted kings and bankers but also dwarves, saints, rebels, and prostitutes; it didn’t matter, he showed them as they were, sufferers and sinners alone in the world. But the sickness grew stronger. Sick of surfaces. Sick of status. And then sick in his stocky peasant body, physically sick. He was wracked with fevers, visions, voices, demons.

The drawing under his nose, on which pooled his drool, was first intended to be the frontispiece of Los Caprichos. The man in it, him, slumped like him, sitting at the desk in the high-backed chair alone in the night, a black spot, his left eye, turned towards us. His fingers are interlaced as if he is praying, and a dark solar aura, radiating strokes of black ink, flows out of his body. Pale beings float in the emanations: bats and owls under the cross-hatchings, two donkeys above, and a vortex of grotesques rise out of the black lines and out of him, ...

Warning signs

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