Let’s talk about some of the most cursed paintings in all of art history.

These are the Black Paintings – or ‘Pinturas Negras’ – by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya. 

They depict really intense and disturbing themes – witchcraft, cannibalism, violence, and dismemberment.

Goya painted these terrifying works at the end of his life. He had worked as a painter to the Spanish court at the turn of the nineteenth century. Throughout his career, he had witnessed terrible pain, suffering, and hysteria in Spain during the Peninsular War and the repression that followed.

As Goya got older, he lost his hearing. Holed up in his house outside Madrid in his seventies, he was alone, traumatised, and suffering from very poor health. It was at this point that we think he began work on the Black Paintings.

He painted these works directly onto the walls of his home. They do not have titles, and no one really knows why he painted them. It’s a great mystery – but, from the dark subject matter, we can tell that they clearly come from a place of fear and pain.

You might recognise these paintings from other places, as they’ve had a really profound influence on the modern horror genre.

You can see references to them in the works of Robert Eggers and Guillermo del Toro, which is a testament to just how powerful – and disturbing – Goya’s late paintings really are…