Just Drowning....Goya's The Dog

Stevie Smith (1903-1971):
"And not waving but drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning."

Stephen Phelan, The Guardian, January 2019:

"...And I keep coming back to The Drowning Dog, which is funny only in the sense that it makes me cry in public. What long-dead pet served as Goya’s model? The artist loved dogs and wrote about them often in his letters. It reminds me of my own dog, now old and grey around the snout. How long do we have left together? I look at this painting and I see in that poor animal our condition in general, and our historical moment in particular. I’m the dog and you’re the dog, our heads held just above a dark, rising tide."


Jonathan Jones, The Guardian:

"A dog is drowning in quicksand. Its grey head pokes defiantly out of the brown sludge, even as a dead yellow sky above insists there is no hope. No saviour....

...Surely it was the madness of this war, not deafness, that drove Goya into the darkest regions of his mind. Here in Zaragoza – where people fought French soldiers in the narrow streets, and where as a young painter he churned out consoling religious nonsense about miracles and holy pillars – Goya looked into hell. And the Black Paintings are what he saw"

'The Dog',  It is one of Goya's Black Paintings,

 Artist Francisco Goya, 1819-1823