El Maragato Threatens Friar Pedro de Zaldivia with His Gun

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes · c. 1806

Medium

Oil on panel

Original size

Framed: 41.6 × 51.2 × 6.4 cm (16 3/8 × 20 1/8 × 2 1/2 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Neoclassicism

One of six small panel paintings Goya made in rapid succession, this work freezes a moment of raw tension — a pistol levelled at close range, the friar's fate hanging on a breath. Goya painted the series around 1806, when he was in his early sixties and already deaf, working with a directness that strips away the formality of his court portraits. The brushwork on these panels is remarkably loose and gestural, almost improvisational, giving the scene an urgency that larger, more laboured compositions rarely achieve. He treats the small format like a sketchbook page — instinctive, unguarded, alive. The subject was drawn from a real incident: a Franciscan friar named Pedro de Zaldivia captured the notorious Spanish bandit Pedro Pinero, "El Maragato," in June 1806, an episode that briefly captured the popular imagination across Spain. A hand-painted oil reproduction on panel lets you experience what makes the original so compelling — not just its subject, but the physical quality of paint applied with conviction, where every mark carries the logic of a painter thinking through a problem at speed.