Focus on this artwork and explain the Description.
Men Reading shows a group of six men huddled together reading a printed page held in the lap of a seated central figure. Although it is not known for certain, they are often thought to be politicians reading, and passing comments on, a newspaper article about themselves. Goya most likely placed the work on a smaller wall of the first floor of the Quinto, next to its companion piece Women Laughing and opposite The Dog and Two Old Men Eating Soup.
X-ray reveals that the image was dramatically altered before Goya settled on what is now on the canvas. At some stage a landscape in the background showed a mounted rider. The central figure in white at one point had large horns, or possibly bird wings, seemingly growing out of his head. From studying the x-rays art historian Carmen Garrido discovered that  the center of the image contained a large white lead impasto beginning at the head of the man looking upwards, and that "both the part on top of the impasto and that which is level with the rest of the painting are identical, and have neither the texture nor the normal structure of the authentic brushstrokes of the painter."Thematically and stylistically it shares characteristics with another work from the Black Paintings series, Women Laughing. Both are vertical rather than horizontal and smaller in scale than the other works. Both are thematically less dark than the other works in the series, although they are chromatically darker. Both are lit by identical light falling from the upper left of the pictorial space. Women Laughing shows two hags mocking a man in the act of masturbating, while in Men reading, according to writer Francisco-Xavier de Salas Bosch, "the incessant talk of the politicians...was perhaps, in Goya’s eyes, as sterile as the solitary pleasure which the women are making fun of."
Black Paintings Two Old Men Women Laughing impasto left The Dog Two Old Men Eating Soup