Fighting inside a church during the Peninsular War

The painting depicts the interior of a church and its parishioners, devastated by the spectre of war. The varied, landscape-format easel composition is little more than a sketch executed over another painting that had previously been discarded, which peeks out from the bottom of the canvas. A battle is depicted in front of the high altar, pitting french soldiers against spanish civilians. The priest on the left looks out at the congregation, raising the monstrance. Men and women move about in fear, and the wounded lie on the ground. This work seeks to convey the pathos of war, as his mentor Goya did in The Disasters of War.