Saturn eating its children

This drawing shows the well-known theme of Saturn eating his children, which more than twenty years later the Aragonese painter painted on a wall of his Quinta del Sordo (now in the Museo del Prado: Saturn eating a son) with a quite different composition to this one. In this drawing Saturn's face does not have the expressiveness and strength it has in the painting. The upper part of the figure is shown, depicted as a giant-sized, bearded old man holding his two much smaller sons in his hands and biting one of them, which differs in part from the later painting of the Quinta del Sordo, in which only one of the sons is reflected at the moment when Saturn tears him apart and engulfs him, making the scene one of the cruelest in Goya's iconography.

This sketch, according to Gassier, was not continued in the Caprices series.