Goya Meets Frankenstein

Francisco de Goya, Los Chinchillas, 1799

Did a Francisco de Goya print inspire the make-up for Frankenstein's monster in the 1931 Hollywood movie? A text panel in the Norton Simon Museum's "I Saw It: Francisco de Goya, Printmaker" answers in the affirmative.

It refers to plate 50 of Goya's Los Caprichos, titled "Los Chinchillas." "The flat, square head and prominent brow ridge of the reclining figure at lower left inspired the make-up for actor Boris Karloff's role as Frankenstein in the 1931 movie." The claim is easy to believe, as the resemblance is striking. Similar claims are to be found on museum websites and online discussions of Goya's print. Yet I believe that  the Goya-Frankenstein connection is an urban legend, unprovable at best. Here's why.

Unknown photographer, Boris Karloff with Jack Pierce. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The title "Los Chinchillas" means, um, The Chinchillas. The reference is not to the Andean furry but to a Spanish comedy, "El dómine Lucas," by playwright José de Cañizares (1676-1750). The play is about the ridiculously named Chinchillas, a family of upper-class twits who are obsessed with their aristocratic bloodlines.

In Goya's 1799 etching with aquatint, two aristocrats are wrapped in their coats of arms. Their brains are padlocked against new ideas. The one at right is being spoonfed by a figure wearing donkey ears, representing Ignorance.

Nineteen years later, Mary Shelley published Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Her antihero Dr. Victor Frankenstein describes his 8-1/2-ft.-tall monster:

"His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips."

Richard Brinkley Peake's "Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein," 1823

The novel was soon adapted to the stage. A publication of Richard Brinsley Peake's 1823 adaptation "Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein," shows a boyishly "beautiful" monster with flowing hair, akin to Jacques-Louis David's smirking 1817 Cupid. It's reported that Mary Shelley saw this production and approved the interpretation of the creature. But a sketch from the play's 1828 revival records a menacing, kouros-rigid wraith.

Richard Wynn Keene, actor O. Smith as Frankenstein's monster in Richard Brinsley Peake's "Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein," English Opera House, Lyceum, 1828

Karoly Grosz, poster for Frankenstein, 1931. (c) Universal Pictures

James Whale's 1931 film for Universal cast Boris Karloff as the monster, with Jack Pierce creating the make-up. The Hollywood version departs considerably from Shelley's text. The Karloff monster has a flat-top head, not mentioned by Shelley nor present in early stage productions (but a feature of Goya's print). It has two electrodes ("bolts") protruding from its neck. That detail is not found in Shelley or Goya. The electrodes have been attributed to Karoly Grosz, the gifted, Hungarian-born illustrator who designed posters for many of the classic Universal monster films.

The Goya similarity centers on the 1799 print's padlocked heads. Both Chinchillas are shown with flattened heads, as if squeezed into shape by their padlocks, like Japanese watermelons. Pierce said that the squared-off head was supposed to represent the outcome of a brain transplant, a statement that many have found puzzling. Pierce used cotton to square the head make-up.

Under the studio system Pierce would have had notes aplenty on the creature's appearance. He was interviewed about the Frankenstein make-up at the time of the film's release and later, as it came to be accepted as a classic. Never, as far as I can tell, did he mention Goya's Los Chinchillas as an influence.

Pierce lived to 1968; poster artist Grosz to 1952, director Whale to 1957, and actor Karloff to 1969. They didn't mention Goya either.

So where does the idea come from? It seems to originate in two books by film historian Christopher Frayling: Mad, Bad, and Dangerous?: The Scientist and the Cinema (2005) and Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years (2017).

The former reproduces Los Chinchillas. Frayling writes,

"Instead of Mary Shelley's beautiful but scary creature, her new Adam, instead of Peake's dark-haired brute in a scarf, the Monster became a more literal thing of scars and stitches and skewers—loosely based on an image of the madhouse entitled The Chincillas [sic] from Goya's series of prints Caprichos / Caprices (1799)."

That's it. Frayling does not cite any earlier source. He does not say where and how Pierce encountered the print. The 2005 book came out 74 years after the movie and 35+ years after the deaths of its creative partners. 

My guess is that Frayling noticed the similarity to Goya's print and thought it worth mentioning. But he errs (IMHO) by not acknowledging that visual similarity does not imply artistic influence. Sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence.

Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781. Detroit Institute of Arts

Frayling's 2017 book expands on this theme, connecting Frankenstein's monster (and his bride) to a slide-show of art history. Elsa Lanchester's The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is juxtaposed with ancient Egypt's Queen Nefertiti and Henry Fuseli's The Nightmare. It's fascinating, but again, Frayling doesn't make much distinction between coincidence and influence.

Karoly Grosz, poster for The Bride of Frankenstein, 1935. (c) Universal Pictures

The New York Times review of Frayling's Frankenstein said, "According to Frayling, Karloff’s look was directly informed by 'Los Chinchillas,' a print from Francisco de Goya’s 1799 series 'Los Caprichos,' which unfortunately isn’t pictured."

With the imprimatur of the NYT, the Goya /Frankenstein claim has since been widely taken as fact. The Philadelphia Museum of Art's collection website says of its impression of Los Chinchillas: "If these figures look familiar it may be because the makeup for Boris Karloff’s character in the 1931 movie Frankenstein is purportedly based on the foolish nobles in the print."

The "purportedly" helps. But qualifiers tend to get stripped out in the retelling, as in the NSM label.

Post-1931 appropriations

Intellectual property lawyers have split many a hair over Shelley's public domain novel and Universal's copyrighted interpretation of the monster's appearance. Visual adaptations of Frankenstein can be distinguished between those operating under Universal's license (the 1964-66 sitcom The Munsters) and those relying on fair use (FrankenBerry cereal), parody (Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein), Shelley's text (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), and/or counterintuitively handsome monsters (Lisa Frankenstein). 

A public domain source for the Universal Frankenstein in Goya could upset this applecart. But I suspect that Frayling's claim would fail to stand up in a court of law. In any case, the copyright for Universal's Frankenstein is set to expire in 2026.

Los Chinchillas aside, any would-be horror auteurs can find inspiration in the Norton Simon show. "I Saw It: Francisco de Goya, Printmaker" runs through Aug. 5, 2024.

Installation view of "I Saw It: Francisco de Goya, Printmaker"