Why hide them?

In the foreground an old miser with deformed features tries to hide, almost to protect with his bent body, two bags of coins. Next to him, slightly in the background, a man in a frock coat and top hat can be seen pointing with his hand to the left. Somewhat further back, three other figures can be seen laughing at the old man's attitude. Goya is at pains to capture the physical decrepitude of the old miser as this is, at the same time, a way of characterising him from a moral point of view.

It is possible that those to whom the situation arouses a certain hilarity are relatives of the old man, perhaps his nephews and nieces, as indicated in the interpretation of this engraving provided by the manuscripts of Ayala and the National Library, who are confidently awaiting the death of the character. These texts suggest that the subject of the image could be either a bishop or a cleric.

The Aragonese painter worked on the basis of parallel lines without delimiting the outlines of the figures, using aquatint to achieve the cohesion of the figures and to shade the different planes.

In this print Goya criticises greed, which had already been dealt with, among other cases, in Moral Dreams, Visions, and Visits of Torres with Don Francisco de Quevedo in Madrid by Diego de Torres Villarroel (Salamanca, 1693-1770).