Another royal commission entrusted to Goya was to paint episodes of the war, especially of the siege of Zaragoza. Accompanied by his pupil Luis Gil Ranz, he set out to obtain studies. Owing to the exaltation of the populace the journey is said to have abounded in incidents and perils. The language of signs which Ranz employed in conversing with his deaf master caused them to be mistaken for spies. They were forced to seek sanctuary at Renales, the pupil’s native town, where they waited until a favourable opportunity offered for their return to Madrid. The melancholy which had settled upon Goya after the accession of the intrusive King increased with advancing age. In the seclusion of his house (the house in which he had entertained the noblest of the Court circle--the Deaf Man’s House, as it came to be called by the Madrileños) he beguiled the time by painting the walls with fantastic and gruesome visions which gave it an awesome and startling appearance. But the brilliant fancy had been obscured by the national vicissitudes he had witnessed and the haunting memories of the war obsessed his imagination. These paintings, which are now preserved in the Prado, produce a painful impression; they would seem to be the creations of a fevered brain. In 1817 Goya visited Seville to paint the picture of Santas Justa and Rufina for the Cathedral, to which reference has been made. On his return he designed a new series of Caprices, and executed many portraits and miniatures on ivory. It was at this time, too, that he made his first essay in lithography. The earliest of these lithographs is a fine brush drawing of an old woman spinning. It is signed and dated February 1819. Among the drawings upon stone that were executed about this period, the two most important are ‘Los Chiens,’ a bull attacked by dogs, and the splendid diabolical scene of a man being dragged along by demons. This last, which is in the Print Room of the British Museum, has special interest, as it is the first known wash drawing made upon the stone. M. Lefort mentions six other lithographs which were executed at Madrid before the journey to France: a duel between two people, a young woman reading to two children, a monk, a girl sitting on the knee of an old woman with other women in the background, a drunkard and a woman, and a peasant assaulting a girl.