Nice teacher!

An old witch on a broomstick carries with her a younger witch whom she is teaching to fly. The former is holding on to the pole with both hands and seems to be concentrating, while the younger one is clinging to her teacher's neck, watching a group of people watching the scene from below. All this is taking place under the watchful eye of an owl with its wings outstretched, which the Aragonese painter has depicted in the upper right corner of the engraving.

Goya has lavishly used drypoint and etching to depict the bodies of the two women, painstakingly capturing the aged skin of the old woman in contrast to the smoother, firmer skin of the young woman. He has also worked with precision on the owl observing the scene, the tree in the lower right corner and the figures below watching this flying lesson. In a way, it could be said that the artist has returned to the first engravings of the Caprichos series in which he used a fine-grained aquatint and etching to define the figures well.

Both the Ayala manuscript and the one in the Prado Museum coincide in stressing the importance of the broom used by the witches to fly. In this sense, it is possible that, as with many other prints in the series of The Caprices in which Goya tackles the theme of witchcraft, one of the sources of inspiration was the Auto de fe held in the city of Logroño on 6 and 7 November 1610, in which the practices of the witches were recounted.

On the other hand, a careful reading of the explanation of this engraving in the manuscript in the National Library leads us to believe that this image refers allegorically to prostitution. It reads as follows: "The old women take the broom out of the hands of those with good moustaches; they give them lessons in flying around the world, putting a broomstick between their legs for the first time". In this way, Goya would be referring to the procuresses who introduce some young girls into prostitution through the image of the old women who place a broomstick between their legs, teaching them to fly. This explanation would have to do with the choice of the title of the first state proof, They Flew, which has a clearly sexual connotation. Goya replaced it with the less explicit title by which we know this work.