In 1877 the Paris magazine L'Art published the four prints of the Follies which had been separated from the rest of the series and had not previously been published. The publishers, unaware of the workshop proofs with their handwritten titles, entitled these four prints Rain of Bulls [Folly of Little Bulls]; Other Laws for the People [Animal Folly]; What a Warrior! [Well-known Folly] and A Circus Queen [Timely Folly] — in Spanish, Lluvia de toros [Disparate de toritos]; Otras leyes para el pueblo [Disparate de bestia]; ¡Qué guerrero! [Disparate conocido] and Una reina del circo [Disparate puntual]. L'Art was a weekly magazine, which published etchings alongside articles on art. Published since 1875, the magazine tapped into a wave of bibliophilia in Paris at the time, and a renewed interest in etching among painters and engravers who discovered in this technique a way of creating original prints, at a remove from academic reproduction engravings. The result was a plethora of works of extraordinary quality, which prized both the original work and the quality of the prints, with great care taken in the choice of paper and ink. The regular edition of the magazine included each of the prints with the title and a reference to the authorship, printed in black ink on laid bone-coloured paper. However, in view of the propensity for exclusivity felt by many bibliophiles, five special copies of each issue were produced, which also included three variations, made from each copperplate before the lettering was engraved. Thus, each of these five copies contained the following prints made from the same copperplate: the first, on laid bone-coloured paper with black ink, including a text with the authorship and title; the second, on wove paper with natural sienna ink; the third, also printed before the lettering was engraved, on laid Japanese paper with black ink; and, finally, the fourth, also without lettering, on vellum with black ink. While the first three were bound with hinges, the last, due to the quality of the material, was left unbound, interleaved between the pages of the text. These prints are valuable not only as artworks by Goya, but as a product and record of the prevailing aesthetic of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, at a time when it was considered perfectly legitimate to 'manipulate' the works, influencing the contemporary vision of the artist's work. The edition is characterized by a refined printing process, with the maximum care being taken over the printing process: neat bevelling, selection of the best ink for each type of paper, and an attempt to use the most aesthetically pleasing types of paper. Together with the relative definition of the plate, the tones of the paper and the colour of the ink are combined to obtain a print of extraordinary quality. As well as laid paper, other excellent quality papers were chosen, such as the J. Whatman Turkey Mill wove paper, generally used for the luxury edition; Japanese laid paper, whose delicate transparency turned the print into an exquisitely fragile item; and finally, vellum, a medium traditionally associated with luxury editions, reminiscent of the prints by the great masters of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Paradoxical though it might seem, these aesthetic divertissements that 'manipulate' Goya's work are closer to what the artist himself sought than the edition produced by the Academy in 1864 with the remaining eighteen plates; the printing is close to natural, with almost all the excess ink removed, thus highlighting the symbolic value Goya placed on white in his prints, as can be seen in all his previous series.

The dating of the Follies is disputed, although we know for sure that Way of Flying was made prior to 1816, since Goya gave his friend Ceán Bermúdez a copy of the Tauromaquia, which went on sale that year, in which he included this print. It is possible, however, that he continued to work on these prints, which are truly remarkable for their size and the expressive deformation of the figures, right up to his departure for France in 1824. The copper plates, together with those of the Disasters of War, were kept at the Quinta del Sordo, which was acquired by Goya in 1819, but it is not possible to specify when they were first stored there.

Together with his Black Paintings and some other works from that period, the Follies show the first manifestations of Goya's truly modern style. Unlike Classicism, characterized by conforming to rules and by following and imitating the rules of nature, Modernity is characterised by the predominance of the subject over any external reference, by the absolute power of the imagination, released from any imitation, and by the subjectivisation of thought and art. The structuring of the work — of the series, in this case — is a constant feature of Classicism, whereas in Modernity we see the breaking down of the very concept of sequence, of a beginning and an end. Thus, the break with the natural and imitative logic of nature, and consequently with its dispersion, to the benefit of the artist's own subjective, of what lies behind the apparent, leads to the loss of denotative points of reference. This breaks with the formerly prevailing logic of communication; from here on in, viewers were to find themselves confronted by pictures for which they lacked any stable or familiar interpretative code. Goya's prints, because they are invented without obvious references, lack a single, unique explanation. Very varied explanations have been given of these extraordinarily modern, ranging from a satire of customs and society in general, similar to that found in the Caprices, to a reflection of the politics of the complex reign of King Ferdinand VII, with its alternating periods of absolutism and fierce repression with brief periods of greater freedom and hope, in which the King even temporarily restored the Spanish Constitution. One should perhaps note that these images depict the turbulent, ignorant and carnivalesque Spain in which the artist himself was immersed; for Goya, there was no other way out but to leave for exile in Bordeaux.

After the artist's death in 1828, the copper plates of the Follies became the property of his estate, and they remained in the family until the death of his son, Francisco Javier, in May 1854. Eighteen plates appear to have been acquired by Román Garreta, and on 19 July 1856 Jaime Machén Casalins first offered them to the Spanish State for the National Museum of Engraving (Calcografía Nacional). In October 1862 they were eventually acquired by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, together with the eighty plates of the Disasters of War series. Four other plates —the ones that do not appear in the Academy's 1864 edition and were first published in 1877 in the French magazine L'Art— were separated from the set and became the property of the painter Eugenio Lucas, who was involved in valuing the Black Paintings at the Quinta del Sordo in October 1856. He may well have been given them in payment for his work, or he may simply have chosen to buy them. Upon Lucas' death in 1870, the four plates were offered to the Academy. However, due to lack of agreement, they finally left Spain and were acquired by the French art merchant Edmont Sagot. The plates, which were in a private Parisian collection, were recently acquired by the Louvre.

José Manuel Matilla Rodríguez