“I’m the same age Goya was when he painted The Drowning Dog,” Arnold said the midnight he turned seventy-three. We were seated on a park bench in Tompkins Square. It was full summer and too hot to stay in our apartment. “He was living at the farmhouse he had bought miles from Madrid. He had been going deaf for decades, but now he was stone deaf. Stone. What a perfect description. Think about it: He had once been the favored portraitist of the Spanish royal court, and now the only person who saw his work was the peasant woman who cleaned and cooked for him.”

“Do you think she thought the dog was drowning or swimming?” I asked.

“She thought the dog was going to heaven either way.”

Arnold’s appreciation of Goya had evolved over time from reverence of a master to camaraderie with another septuagenarian. Arnold had finally accepted that the power of the Black Paintings could not be separated from the medium in which they grew, the coming solitude of old age.