No one knows for certain why Francisco de Goya painted Witches' Sabbath directly onto the walls of his own house, the so-called "Quinta del Sordo," around 1820, but its survival is a marvel of both chance and determination. Unlike his earlier version of the same subject, this Witches' Sabbath was never meant for public eyes; it was part of the mysterious "Black Paintings" series that Goya created in near-total isolation, at a time when he was old, deaf, and deeply disillusioned by the violence and superstition that gripped Spain. The painting’s original medium is still debated—oil on plaster, transferred later to canvas—but its haunted imagery has lost none of its power in the process.

For decades, these works were hidden, their very existence known only to a few, until they were painstakingly removed from the crumbling walls in the late nineteenth century. At the heart of Witches' Sabbath, a monstrous goat—traditionally the Devil in disguise—presides over a terrified coven of witches. Goya freezes the scene at the moment of initiation: the witches, gaunt and ghostly, cower before their horned master, whose eyes glow with unnatural life. The figures are arranged in a sickly, moonlit gloom, their faces twisted in fear or frenzy; a child lies limp in the foreground, hinting at the darkest of rituals.

Unlike the theatrical, almost playful witches of Salvator Rosa or Hans Baldung, Goya’s vision is claustrophobic and raw, the supernatural rendered as a symptom of human ignorance and cruelty. The brushwork is loose, almost violent, as if the painting itself were conjured in a fever. After Goya’s death, the "Black Paintings" remained on the walls of the Quinta del Sordo until 1874, when Baron Émile d’Erlanger acquired the property and commissioned the transfer of the murals onto canvas—a risky process that saved them from decay but altered their texture forever. In 1881, d’Erlanger donated the entire series to the Spanish state, and today Witches' Sabbath hangs in the Museo del Prado, a testament to Goya’s late, haunted genius.

The painting marks a sharp break from his earlier, more public commissions, and stands as a private reckoning with fear, superstition, and the darkness of the human mind. Its journey from private wall to national treasure is as strange and unsettling as the scene it depicts.