The bogeyman is coming

In the centre of the print, slightly shifted to the right, we can see a figure completely covered in a tunic looking at a seated mother holding her two children. One of them raises his arms and seems to want to flee in terror, while the other clings to the mother figure in search of protection.

Goya used aquatint for the background and etching to create the folds in the tunic of the figure who is frightening the children, as well as the mother and the children.

In the manuscripts on the meaning of The Caprices, several clarifications are made about the meaning of this print. The one in the Prado Museum states that this work "represents the disastrous abuse of early education. Making a child more afraid of the Coco than of his father and forcing him to fear what does not exist". The Ayala manuscript notes that Goya depicted how "mothers frighten their children with the Coco to talk to their lovers", while the National Library manuscript states that "foolish mothers make children fearful by depicting the Coco; and others worse use this artifice to be alone with their lovers when they cannot keep their children away from them".

The bogeyman was a figure used to reprimand and frighten children when they did not behave properly. In a 17th-century song that alludes to this figure, whose morphology is unknown to us, the following is said: "Duerma y sosiegue/ que a la fe que venga el coco/ si no se duerme" ("Sleep and be calm/ that the bogeyman will come to faith/ if he does not sleep"). In this image, the Aragonese painter, from the perspective of an enlightened man, emphasises the importance of education and the need for children to grow up free of superstition and ghosts.

At the same time, this work admits a second reading that would have to do with the criminals who took advantage of the superstitions of the people to commit their misdeeds by entering houses at night, disguised as spectral beings. This is explained by Fray Benito Jerónimo Feijóo (Casdemiro, Pereiro de Aguiar, 1676-Oviedo, 1764) who in his work Theatro crítico universal (1726-1739) says the following: "(...) O quantos hurtos, quantos estrupos, y adulterios se han cometido, cubriendo, ó los agresores, ó los medianeros con la capa de Duendes! These heavy mockeries were stopped, or stopped whenever in the house where they took place, there was a man of spirit, who intrepidly endeavoured to examine the truth. Where the whole family is made up of easily credulous people, deceit is sure to triumph, unless some accident reveals it".

To capture this world of the unreal, Goya may have drawn on images by the painter Salvator Rosa (Naples 1620-Rome, 1673), whose work he was probably familiar with during his stay in Italy (1769-1771), when he was still a budding artist. The haunting figure in Goya's engraving recalls the protagonist of Rosa's painting The Shadow of Samuel Appears to Saul (1668, Musée du Louvre, Paris). Furthermore, the appropriate treatment of the panneggio by which Goya has succeeded in giving corporeality to the canvases in which the anatomy is concealed is related to the figures that Charon is carrying in his boat as he crosses the Stygian Lagoon in the work by Pierre Subleyras (Saint-Gilles-du-Gard, 1699- Rome, 1749) entitled Charon carrying the shadows (ca. 1735, Musée du Louvre, Paris).

The theme of education was again addressed in prints no. 4, The rollona, and no. 25, The Pitcher Broke from the series of The Caprices.

This engraving aroused the interest of Eugène Delacroix (Charenton-Saint-Maurice, 1798-Paris, 1836), who copied it using the aquatint technique (ca. 1830, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris).