And his house burns down

The picture depicts an old man trying to put on his trousers. His spread legs, one of them slightly forward, reveal the difficulty he is having in getting dressed and indicate his state of inebriation. As a result, a fire is about to break out, as a lamp has set fire to a wooden chair on which the drunkard has propped it up.

The three manuscripts available to us all agree on the meaning of this print in which Goya criticises the abuse of alcohol, which is even more blatant in the case of a man of a certain age and from whom mature attitudes are to be expected. It is possible that the painter took as his starting point for this image one of the relatively common fires reported in the newspapers, especially in the esparto shops, many of which were attributed to the drunkenness of those responsible. This hypothesis is quite plausible if we take into account the title of one of the drawings that would have served as preparation for this engraving, Drunken Espartero who fails to undress.

This is not the only time Goya confronts alcohol abuse, as he does so again in The Drunkards. However, in the latter, beyond being critical, he captures a genre scene in the style of Dutch painting, more specifically, some paintings by Frans Hals (Antwerp, 1580?-Haarlem, 1666).