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Textural Etching

Goya used textural etching to create areas of crosshatched tone in localised areas or over the entire copperplate, as seen in No hay quien nos desate? (Is there no one to untie us?). (See fig. 26). The technique is achieved by applying a soft ground, which is more yielding than hard ground, to the surface of the copperplate. Soft ground was made by adding additional beeswax or lard to the basic hard ground recipe and numerous Goya prints in the NGV collection have a crosshatched tonal appearance, indicating he may have placed a textural material such as burlap on top of a soft ground and passed the plate through the printing press to press the fabric into the surface.

When the fabric was removed, so was the soft ground at all the contact points. The resulting exposed areas of copperplate were then vulnerable to the action of acid, and these were etched, often very lightly by exposing the plate for a brief time to weak acid, to create a subtle area of tone.⁴¹

To create No hay quien nos desate? (Is there no one to untie us?), it is likely Goya applied the hard ground first and etched the lines denoting the bound couple and owl. The hard ground would have been removed and a layer of soft ground would have been applied to the clean, dry copperplate and fabric placed on top. The compositional lines are much more obvious than the subtle cross hatched lines created by the fabric. This effect is achieved by either using weaker acid for biting through the soft ground or exposing this area to acid for less time than the linear work.