Goya

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• Born: 30 March 1746
• Birthplace: Fuendetodos, Zaragoza, Spain
• Died: 16 April 1828
• Best Known As: Spanish painter of Maya Nude

Name at birth: Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes

Goya is considered the 18th Century's foremost painter and etcher of Spanish culture, known for his realistic scenes of battles, bullfights and human corruption. Goya lived during a time of upheaval in Spain that included war with France, the Inquisition, the rule of Napoleon's brother, Joseph, as the King of Spain and, finally, the reign of the Spanish King Ferdinand VII. Experts proclaim these events -- and Goya's deafness as a result of an illness in 1793 -- as central to understanding Goya's work, which frequently depicts human misery in a satiric and sometimes nightmarish fashion. From the 1770s he was a royal court painter for Charles III and Charles IV, and when Bonaparte took the throne in 1809, Goya swore fealty to the new king. When the crown was restored to Spain's Ferdinand VII (1814), Goya, in spite of his earlier allegiance to the French king, was reinstated as royal painter. After 1824 he lived in self-imposed exile in Bordeaux until his death, reportedly because of political differences with Ferdinand. Over his long career he created hundreds of paintings, etchings, and lithographs, among them Maya Clothed and Maya Nude (1798-1800); Caprichos (1799-82); The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808 (1814); Disasters of War (1810-20); and The Black Paintings (1820-23). Although he left behind no followers of note, his work influenced artists of the 19th and 20th centuries (especially Picasso), and Goya is sometimes called "the Father of Modern Art."

Francisco de Paula José de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) was Spain's greatest painter and printmaker during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a wayward genius who prefigured in his art the romantic, impressionist, and expressionist movements.

Born in Fuendetodos near Saragossa on March 30, 1746, Francisco Goya died a voluntary expatriate in Bordeaux, France. Tradition has it that a priest discovered talent in the boy upon seeing him draw a hog on a wall. Oddly enough, a testament submitted for the process of beatification of Father José Pignatelli disclosed (not detected until 1962) that he taught Goya, who "instead of paying attention, kept his head down so that his teacher couldn't see him and occupied himself in sketching…."Pignatelli ordered him to the front of the class but recognized an artistic gift in the sketches. The priest called upon José Goya, the boy's father, and advised him to dedicate his son to painting. Perhaps owing to this same priest's influence, Goya at 12 years of age painted three works (destroyed 1936) for the church in Fuendetodos.

Two years later, Goya was apprenticed to José Luzán y Martínez, a mediocre, Neapolitan-trained painter who set his pupil to copying the best prints he possessed. After 4 years of this training, Goya left. He went to Madrid in 1763 to compete unsuccessfully for a scholarship to San Fernando Academy. The tests ended on Jan. 15, 1764, and nothing is known of the artist until 2 years later, when he entered another academic competition calling for a painting of the following subject: Empress Martha presents herself to King Alphonse the Wise in Burgos to petition a third of the ransom required by the sultan of Egypt for the rescue of her husband, Emperor Valduin; the Spanish king orders the full sum to be given her. The competitors were granted 6 months to execute this theme; Goya failed again. On July 22 he entered a competition to sketch another complicated historical scene and lost for the third time.

Early Works

Little is known of Goya's subsequent activities until April 1771, when he was in Rome. Two small paintings, both dated 1771 and one signed "Goya," were recently discovered: Sacrifice to Pan and Sacrifice to Vesta. The monumental figures are classical but executed with sketchy brushstrokes and bathed in theatrical lighting. From Rome he sent to the Academy of Parma for an open competition another painting, Hannibal in the Alps Contemplating the Italian Lands, and signed himself as a pupil of Francisco Bayeu in his accompanying letter. Although he was not the winner, he did receive six of the votes and laudatory mention. Immediately after he had received this news, Goya departed for Saragossa.

The aforementioned works, and a handful more, are all that is known of Goya's art between 1766 and 1771. Sánchez Cantón (1964) pointed out that there are no concrete incidents to document the usual explanation, adduced from his known temperament, that he was otherwise occupied in womanizing, bullfighting, and brawling.

In Saragossa, Goya received important commissions, which he executed with success. On July 25, 1775, he married Josefa Bayeu, Francisco's sister. Bayeu, who was a director of the San Fernando Academy, used his influence to help his brother-in-law. Goya was commissioned to paint cartoons of contemporary customs and holiday activities for the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Barbara. This work, well suited to his nature, lasted from 1774 to 1792. He completed 54 cartoons in a rococo style that mingled influences from Michel Ange Houasse, Louis Michel Van Loo, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and Anton Raphael Mengs.

Following an illness in 1778, Goya passed his convalescence executing his first series of engravings from 16 paintings by Diego Velázquez. Goya began to enjoy signs of recognition: he was praised by Mengs, named as a court painter by Charles III in 1779, and elected to membership in San Fernando Academy after he presented a small, classical painting, the Crucified Christ, in 1780. On the crest of this wave of approval, a quarrel with his important brother-in-law had serious consequences upon his career: in 1780 he was commissioned to paint a dome and its pendentives for the Cathedral of El Pilar in Saragossa. Bayeu suggested certain corrections in the domical composition, which Goya rejected. Then the council of the Cathedral took objection to certain nudities in his preparatory sketches for the pendentives and ordered him to submit his designs to Bayeu for correction and final approval. Goya accepted this condition, but afterward he declared he would "take it to court first." Later he wrote to a friend that, just to think about the incident, "I burn alive." This affair seems to have caused a hiatus (1780-1786) in his cartoons for the royal factory.

The Portraits

The King commissioned Goya in 1780 to paint an altarpiece for the church of S. Francisco el Grande, Madrid; this work, the Preaching of St. Bernardino, was completed in 1784. No works by Goya are known for the year 1782 and only portraits for 1783, among which is one of the Count of Floridablanca, First Secretary of State. Other portraits of this period include those of the members of the family of the infante Don Luis (1783-1784) and the brilliant portrait of the Duke of Osuna (1785).

The artist was back in favor sometime before May 11, 1785, when he was appointed lieutenant director of painting (under Bayeu) in the Academy of San Fernando. The following year he was again working on the tapestry cartoons, and in June he was named painter to the king. Bayeu, clearly reconciled, sat for his portrait in 1786. Goya also executed many portraits of the royal family and members of the nobility, including the very appealing picture of the little Manuel Osorio de Zuñiga (1788).

In 1792 a committee was appointed to reform the academic methods of teaching at the Academy, and the minutes read in part: "Señor Goya openly declared himself in favor of freedom in the mode of teaching and in stylistic practices, saying that all servile submission of a children's school should be excluded, as well as mechanical precepts, monthly awards, tuition aids, and other trivialities that feminize and vilify painting. Nor should time be predetermined to study geometry or perspective to conquer difficulties in sketching."

Goya fell gravely ill in Seville at the end of 1792. He was left totally deaf and underwent a personality change from extrovert to introvert with an intense interest in evil spirits, a temporary avoidance of large canvases, and a preference for sketches in preparation for prints. He was back at work in Madrid by July 1793, and that year he produced a series of panels which he presented to the Academy of San Fernando. They include a scene in a madhouse, a bullfight, and an Inquisition scene.

Duchess of Alba

Goya received a commission from the noble house of Alba in 1795. Since he moved in aristocratic circles, it is clear that he must have known the duchess for some time before this. At any rate, after the duke's death in July 1796, she retired to her villa in Sanlucar, and Goya was one of her guests. Upon his return to Madrid in 1797, he painted the duchess in black but with a wide colored belt (therefore not a mourning garment), wearing two rings, one imprinted "Alba" and the other "Goya." He signed the work "Goya, always."

Whatever their relationship was, it is clear that Goya had high hopes. It is also true that in the spring following the duke's death the duchess's servants were gossiping in correspondence about her possible remarriage. Nevertheless, Señora Goya was still living, and Goya could not be the unnamed swain. In any event, the duchess never did remarry. At best, Goya's painting was a brazen flaunting of illicit hopes; at worst, a vulgar display of kiss-and-tell.

Goya's first great series of etchings, Los caprichos (1796-1798), were based on drawings from his Madrid Sketchbook. They include scenes of witchcraft, popular traditions, bullfights, and society balls. In the Caprichos Goya mercilessly and vindictively lampooned the duchess, depicting her in immodest postures; representing her as "a stylish fool" and adding, "There are heads so swollen with inflammable gas that they can fly without being helped by a balloon or by witches;" and likening her to a two-headed, butterfly brain of a "lie and inconstancy." The duchess died in 1802, following a long illness. Goya painted the Nude Maja and the Clothed Maja later (usually dated between 1805 and 1807). The heads in both appear to float, neckless, above the shoulders.

Inquisition and the Peninsular War

By the first years of the 19th century Goya was a wealthy man able to purchase an impressive home in 1803 and marry his son to an heiress in 1805. Simultaneously he was attracting the attention of the Holy Office of the Inquisition owing to the anticlerical satire in the Caprichos as well as his salacious subject matter. He donated all the Caprichos plates and the 240 unsold sets of the edition to the King under the pretext of seeking a pension for his son to travel; once the donation was accepted, the Holy Office perforce withdrew. The inquisitors did not forget, however; they investigated him again in 1814 concerning the nude and dressed Majas. Incomplete documentation leaves this incident obscure.

During the Napoleonic usurpation of the Spanish throne and the consequent War of Independence (1808-1813) Goya had an enigmatic record. With 3,000 other heads of families in Madrid on Dec. 10, 1808, he swore "love and fidelity" to the invader. In 1810 he attended the Academy to greet its new protector appointed by Joseph Bonaparte, but that same year he began work on his series of 80 etchings, Los desastres de la guerra (The Disasters of War), which, in many cases, is a specific condemnation of the Napoleonic war, although the expressionistic rendering makes the series a universal protest against the horrors of war. He finished the Desastres in 1814, the same year he painted the Executions of May 3, 1808, a grim depiction of a brutal massacre.

Goya applauded, understandably, the French suppression of the Inquisition and the secularization of religious orders. Yet in the joint will he made with his wife in 1811, he requested that he be buried in the Franciscan habit and have Masses offered and prayers said for his soul, and he made grants to holy places. His wife died in 1812, the year in which Goya painted the Assumption of the Virgin for the parish church of Chinchón, where his brother, Camilo, was the priest.

Goya executed two more series of etchings. Los proverbios (1813-1815; 1817-1818), or Disparates, as he himself called the series, are monstrous in mood and subject. The Tauromachia (1815-1816) is a series devoted to the art of bullfighting.

Last Years

In 1819 Goya purchased a villa, La Quinta del Sordo (Villa of the Deaf Man), at a time when his son and daughter-in-law were estranged from him, perhaps owing to another affair. His housekeeper was Leocadia Zorrilla de Weiss, a distant relative who was separated from her German husband, by whom she had had a son and daughter. Goya was so fond of the latter, Rosario, born in 1814, that some believe he was her father. Goya frescoed two rooms of the villa with his "black paintings." These profoundly moving works are a strange mixture of the horrendous (Saturn Devouring His Son), the diabolic (Witches' Sabbath), the salacious (The Jesters), the devout (Pilgrimage of San Isidro), and the ordinary (Portrait of Leocadia Zorrilla, previously called Una manola). These subjects and the others in the series make an ensemble that is as puzzling to interpret psychologically as it is emotionally overpowering.

In 1823 political events greatly affected Goya's life: Fernando VII, discontented with the constitution that had been forced upon him, left his palace in Madrid and went to Seville. Two months later the Duke of Angoulême with "one hundred thousand sons of St. Louis" invaded Spain to help Fernando VII. Goya, a liberal, immediately turned over the title to his villa to his grandson Mariano and took refuge in a friend's house. The following year Goya sought permission to spend 6 months enjoying the waters of Plombières "to mitigate the sickness and attacks that molested him in his advanced age." All this time Goya was receiving his royal salaries (and continued to do so up to his death) even though he had ceased to create works as First Court Painter or to teach in the Academy of San Fernando.

When the King granted his request, Goya immediately went to Bordeaux with Leocadia and her children. A friend described Goya's arrival: "deaf, sluggish and weak, without one word of French yet so happy and so desirous to see the world." He went back to Spain in 1825 to ask to be retired and was granted permission to return to France "with all the salary." His paintings in Bordeaux, especially the Milkmaid of Bordeaux, indicate a release from his dark emotions. He died of a stroke on April 15, 1828, in Bordeaux.

Further Reading

There are many good books on Goya and his art. In English, José López-Rey, Goya's Caprichos (2 vols., 1953), provides an excellent understanding of Goya's tormented genius. A sensitive insight is given by André Malraux, Saturn: An Essay on Goya (1950; trans. 1957). See also Charles Poore, Goya (1938); Francis Donald Klingender, Goya in the Democratic Tradition (1948); Pierre Gassier, Goya: A Biographical and Critical Study (trans. 1955); Royal Academy of Arts, London, Goya and His Times (1963); Francisco Javier Sánchez Cantón, The Life and Works of Goya (trans. 1964); and Tomás Harris, Goya: Engravings and Lithographs (2 vols., 1964).

For more information on Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, visit Britannica.com.

Early Life and Work

After studying in Zaragoza and Madrid and then in Rome, Goya returned c.1775 to Madrid and married Josefa Bayeu, sister of Francisco Bayeu, a prominent painter. Soon after his return he was employed to paint several series of tapestry designs for the royal manufactory of Santa Barbara, which focused attention on his talent. Depicting scenes of everyday life, they are painted with rococo freedom, gaiety, and charm, enhanced by a certain earthy reality unusual in such cartoons. In these early works he revealed the candor of observation that was later to make him the most graphic and savage of satirists.

Goya possessed a driving ambition throughout his life (the only masters he acknowledged were “Nature,” Velázquez, and Rembrandt). His first important portrait commission, to paint Floridablanca, the prime minister, resulted in a painting intended to flatter and please an important sitter, heavy with technical display but less penetrating than the portraits he made of the rich and powerful thereafter. He became painter to the king, Charles III, in 1786, and court painter in 1789, after the accession of Charles IV and Maria Luisa. His royal portraits are painted with an extraordinary realism. Nevertheless, his portraits were acceptable and he was commissioned to repeat them.

Later Life and Mature Work

In 1793 Goya suffered a terrible illness, now thought to have been either labyrinthitis or lead poisoning, that was nearly fatal and left him deaf. This created for him an even greater isolation than was his by nature. After 1793 he began to create uncommissioned works, particularly small cabinet paintings. His portraits of the duchess of Alba, who enjoyed the painter's close friendship and love, are elegant and direct and not flattering. Almost all the notables of Madrid posed for him during those years. Two of his most celebrated paintings, Maja nude and Maja clothed (both: Prado), were painted c.1797–1805. Goya did his chief religious work in 1798, creating a monumental set of dramatic frescoes in the Church of San Antonio de la Florida, Madrid.

Graphic Works

It is in the etching and aquatint media that his profound disillusionment with humanity is most brutally revealed. In 1799 his Caprichos appeared, a series of etchings in the nature of grotesque social satire. They were followed (1810–13) by the terrible Desastres de la guerra [disasters of war], magnificent etchings suggested by the Napoleonic invasions of Spain. They constitute an indictment of human evil and an outrage at a world given over to war and corruption. Two frenzied paintings known as May 2 and May 3, 1808 (both: Prado) also record atrocities of war.

Goya executed two other series of etchings, the Tauromaquia [the bullfight] and the Disparates, the flowers of a tortured, nightmare vision. Throughout the Napoleonic period Goya retained favor under changing regimes. At the age of 70 he retired to his villa, where he is thought to have decorated his walls with a series of “Black Paintings” of macabre subjects, such as Saturn Devouring His Children, Witches' Sabbath, The Dog and The Three Fates (all: Prado). While these mysterious paintings have long been among his most celebrated works, some controversial recent scholarship has indicated that the paintings may be by Goya's son or grandson. Goya's last years, harried by further illness, were spent in voluntary exile in Bordeaux, where he began work in lithography that foreshadowed the style of the great 19th-century painters.

Collections

All phases of Goya's enormous and varied production can be appreciated fully only in Madrid. However, the artist's work is also represented in many European and American collections, notably in the Hispanic Society of America, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Frick Collection, all in New York City, and in the museums of Boston and Chicago.

Bibliography

See P. Gassier and J. Wilson, Goya: His Life and Work (with a catalogue raisonné, tr. 1971); P. Gassier, Francisco Goya: Drawings (tr. 1973); J. A. Tomlinson, Francisco Goya: The Tapestry Cartoons and Early Career at the Court of Madrid (1989); R. Hughes, Goya (2003).

Goya Y Lucientes, Francisco De (1746–1828), Spanish painter and printmaker. Born on 30 March 1746 in the village of Fuendetodos, Francisco Goya received his earliest artistic training in the provincial capital of Saragossa, under the Neapolitan-trained painter José Luzán y Martínez. In 1766 Goya competed unsuccessfully in a drawing competition at the Royal Academy of San Fernando. Documents reveal his entry into another academic competition in Parma, Italy, in 1771, where he received an honorable mention for the painting Hannibal Crossing the Alps (Fundación Selgas-Fagalda, Cudillero, Spain).

On his returning to Saragossa in 1772, Goya undertook religious commissions for private patrons and religious organizations. In 1773 he married the sister of the court painter, Francisco Bayeu y Subías (1734–1795), and it was probably through Bayeu's influence that the artist was invited to the court of Madrid in 1774 to paint designs (also known as cartoons) for the royal tapestry factory. Goya's ability was soon recognized, and he was given permission to paint tapestry cartoons "of his own invention"—that is, he was allowed to develop original subjects for these images. He painted three series of tapestry cartoons for rooms in the royal residences before the tapestry factory cut back production in 1780 because of a financial crisis engendered by Spain's war with England. The decade of the 1780s was nevertheless one of great advancement for the artist, beginning with his election to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in 1780 and continuing as he won patronage for religious paintings and portraits from the grandest families in Spain, including the duke and duchess of Osuna and the count and countess of Altamira. His appointment as court painter in April 1789, four months after Charles IV had acceded to the throne, cemented his fortunes.

Documents and paintings of the early 1790s suggest the artist's growing unease with the limitations imposed on painters by traditions and patronage. Images in his final series of cartoons, such as The Straw Mannikin (1792; Museo del Prado, Madrid), betray an increasingly cynical view. As one of several academicians asked in 1792 to report on the institutional curriculum, he responded that "there are no rules in painting." Thus, although the turn in Goya's art to a more liberated exploration of unprecedented subject matter is often credited to a serious illness suffered in 1792–1793, such a change might have occurred in any case. From 1793 onward, in addition to his work as a painter of commissioned portraits and religious paintings, Goya explored experimental subjects—ranging from shipwrecks to scenes of everyday life in Madrid—in uncommissioned paintings, prints, and drawings. This experimentation led to the publication in 1799 of a series of eighty aquatint etchings known as Los Caprichos, whose subjects encompass witchcraft, prostitution, fantasy, and social satire. It is wrongly thought that these etchings jeopardized Goya's relationship with his patrons; that this is not the case is proven by Goya's promotion to first court painter eight months after their publication. The artist would continue to paint portraits including The Family of Charles IV (1800–1801, Prado), as well as works for the king and queen's close confidant, Manuel Godoy, that include portraits, allegories, and probably the Naked Maja and the Clothed Maja (c. 1797–1805; Prado).

In 1808 Napoleonic forces invaded Spain, the royal family abdicated, and Napoleon's brother, Joseph Bonaparte, assumed the Spanish throne. In 1810 Goya undertook etchings documenting the atrocities of war, today known as the Disasters of War. Goya probably continued work on these etchings even after the Spanish government of Ferdinand VII was restored in 1814, although the series of eighty plates was published only in 1863, thirty-five years after Goya's death. On the restoration of the Spanish monarchy, Goya depicted The Second of May and The Third of May (1813–1814; Prado) to commemorate the Spanish uprising against French troops; although these are among Goya's most famous works, little is known of their original function or placement, or of their early reception.

Goya continued in his position as first court painter under the restored monarch, who nevertheless preferred the neoclassical style of the younger Vicente López. In 1819 Goya purchased a villa on the outskirts of Madrid and painted on the walls of its two main rooms images of witchcraft, religious ceremonies, and mythical subjects today known as the Black Paintings (1819–1823; Prado). In 1824 the artist left Spain and after a brief trip to Paris settled in Bordeaux among a colony of Spanish exiles. Here he continued to paint and draw, and also to experiment with the technique of lithography—leading to the publication of The Bulls of Bordeaux, a masterpiece in that medium. He died in Bordeaux on 26 April 1828.

Bibliography

Gassier, Pierre, and Juliet Wilson. The Life and Complete Works of Francisco Goya. New York, 1971.

Tomlinson, Janis. Francisco Goya y Lucientes, 1746–1828. 2nd ed. London, 1999.

——. Goya in the Twilight of Enlightenment. New Haven and London, 1992.

—JANIS TOMLINSON

A Spanish painter of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Among his works is a series of paintings and etchings that powerfully depict the horrors of war.

Quotes:

"The dream of reason produces monsters. Imagination deserted by reason creates impossible, useless thoughts. United with reason, imagination is the mother of all art and the source of all its beauty."

"Goya" redirects here. For other uses, see Goya (disambiguation).

Francisco Goya
Goya's self-portrait.
Birth name	Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes
Born	March 30 1746(1746--) Fuendetodos
Died	April 16 1828 (aged 82) Bordeaux
Nationality	Spanish
Field	Painting, Printmaking
Famous works	La maja desnuda, ca. 1800 La maja vestida, ca. 1803 The Second of May 1808, 1814 The Third of May 1808, 1814 La familia de Carlos IV, 1798

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (March 30, 1746 – April 16, 1828) was a Aragonese Spanish painter and printmaker.

Goya was a court painter to the Spanish Crown and a chronicler of history. He has been regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and as the first of the moderns. The subversive and subjective element in his art, as well as his bold handling of paint, provided a model for the work of later generations of artists, notably Manet and Picasso.^[1]

Many of Goya's works are on display in the Museo del Prado in Madrid.

Biography

Youth

Goya was born in Fuendetodos, Spain, in the kingdom of Aragón in 1746 to José Goya and Gracia Lucientes. He spent his childhood in Fuendetodos, where his family lived in a house bearing the family crest of his mother. His father earned his living as a gilder. About 1749, the family bought a house in the city of Zaragoza and some years later moved into it.

Goya attended school at Escuelas Pias, where he formed a close friendship with Martin Zapater, and their correspondence over the years became valuable material for biographies of Goya. At age 14, he entered apprenticeship with the painter José Luján.

He later moved to Madrid where he studied with Anton Raphael Mengs, a painter who was popular with Spanish royalty. He clashed with his master, and his examinations were unsatisfactory. Goya submitted entries for the Royal Academy of Fine Art in 1763 and 1766, but was denied entrance.

He then journeyed to Rome, where in 1771 he won second prize in a painting competition organized by the City of Parma. Later that year, he returned to Zaragoza and painted a part of the cupola of the Basilica of the Pillar, frescoes of the oratory of the cloisters of Aula Dei, and the frescoes of the Sobradiel Palace. He studied with Francisco Bayeu y Subías and his painting began to show signs of the delicate tonalities for which he became known.

The Third of May 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid, 1814. Oil on canvas, 266 х 345 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Maturity and success

Goya married Bayeu's sister Josefa in 1774. His marriage to Josefa (he nicknamed her "Pepa"), and Francisco Bayeu's membership of the Royal Academy of Fine Art - he had been a member since 1765 - helped him to procure work with the Royal Tapestry Workshop. There, over the course of five years, he designed some 42 patterns, many of which were used to decorate (and insulate) the bare stone walls of El Escorial and the Palacio Real de El Pardo, the newly built residences of the Spanish monarchs. This brought his artistic talents to the attention of the Spanish monarchs who later would give him access to the royal court. He also painted a canvas for the altar of the Church of San Francisco El Grande, which led to his appointment as a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Art.

In 1783, the Count of Floridablanca, a favorite of King Carlos III, commissioned him to paint his portrait. He also became friends with Crown Prince Don Luis, and lived in his house. His circle of patrons grew to include the Duke and Duchess of Osuna, whom he painted, the King and other notable people of the kingdom.

After the death of Charles III in 1788 and revolution in France in 1789, during the reign of Charles IV, Goya reached his peak of popularity with royalty.^[2]

Caprichos

After contracting a high fever in 1792 Goya was left deaf, and he became withdrawn and introspective. During the five years he spent recuperating, he read a great deal about the French Revolution and its philosophy. The bitter series of aquatinted etchings that resulted were published in 1799 under the title Caprichos. The dark visions depicted in these prints are partly explained by his caption, "The sleep of reason produces monsters". Yet these are not solely bleak in nature and demonstrate the artist's sharp satirical wit, particularly evident in etchings such as Hunting for Teeth. Additionally, one can discern a thread of the macabre running through Goya's work, even in his earlier tapestry cartoons.

The Family of Charles IV, 1800. Théophile Gautier described the figures as looking like "the corner baker and his wife after they won the lottery".

Painter of royalty

In 1786 Goya was appointed painter to Charles III, and in 1789 was made court painter to Charles IV. In 1799 he was appointed First Court Painter with a salary of 50,000 reales and 500 ducats for a coach. He worked on the cupola of the Hermitage of San Antonio de la Florida; he painted the King and the Queen, royal family pictures, portraits of the Prince of the Peace and many other nobles. His portraits are notable for their disinclination to flatter, and in the case of The Family of Charles IV, the lack of visual diplomacy is remarkable.^[3]

Goya received orders from many friends within the Spanish nobility. Among those from whom he procured portrait commissions were Pedro de Álcantara Téllez-Girón, 9th Duke of Osuna and his wife María Josefa de la Soledad, 9th Duchess of Osuna, María del Pilar Teresa Cayetana de Silva y Álvarez de Toledo, 13th Duchess of Alba (universally known simply as the "Duchess of Alba"), and her husband José Álvarez de Toledo y Gonzaga, 13th Duke of Alba, and María Ana de Pontejos y Sandoval, Marchioness of Pontejos.

Later years

Saturn Devouring his Son, 1819. The title, like all those given to the Black Paintings, was assigned by others after Goya's death.

As French forces invaded Spain during the Peninsular War (1808–1814), the new Spanish court received him as had its predecessors.

When Pepa died in 1812, Goya was painting The Charge of the Mamelukes and The Third of May 1808, and preparing the series of prints known as The Disasters of War (Los desastres de la guerra).

King Ferdinand VII came back to Spain but relations with Goya were not cordial. In 1814 Goya was living with his housekeeper Doña Leocadia and her illegitimate daughter, Rosario Weiss; the young woman studied painting with Goya, who may have been her father.^[4] He continued to work incessantly on portraits, pictures of Santa Justa and Santa Rufina, lithographs, pictures of tauromachy, and more.

With the idea of isolating himself, he bought a house near Manzanares, which was known as the Quinta del Sordo (roughly, "House of the Deaf Man"). There he made the Black Paintings.

Unsettled and discontented, he left Spain in May 1824 for Bordeaux and Paris. He settled in Bordeaux. He returned to Spain in 1826 after another period of ill health. Despite a warm welcome, he returned to Bordeaux where he died in 1828 at the age of 82.

Works

Goya painted the Spanish royal family, including Charles IV of Spain and Ferdinand VII. His themes range from merry festivals for tapestry, draft cartoons, to scenes of war and corpses. This evolution reflects the darkening of his temper. Modern physicians suspect that the lead in his pigments poisoned him and caused his deafness since 1792. Near the end of his life, he became reclusive and produced frightening and obscure paintings of insanity, madness, and fantasy. The style of these Black Paintings prefigure the expressionist movement. He often painted himself into the foreground.

The Maja

The Nude Maja, ca. 1800. The Clothed Maja, ca. 1803.

Two of Goya's best known paintings are The Nude Maja (La maja desnuda) and The Clothed Maja (La maja vestida). They depict the same woman in the same pose, naked and clothed, respectively. He painted La maja vestida after outrage in Spanish society over the previous Desnuda. Without a pretense to allegorical or mythological meaning, the painting was "the first totally profane life-size female nude in Western art".^[5] He refused to paint clothes on her, and instead created a new painting. (See also: Majo.)

The identity of the Majas is uncertain. The most popularly cited subjects are the Duchess of Alba, with whom Goya is thought to have had an affair, and the mistress of Manuel de Godoy, who subsequently owned the paintings. Neither theory has been verified, and it remains as likely that the paintings represent an idealized composite.^[6]

In 1808 the paintings were seized by Ferdinand VI, and in 1813 the Inquisition confiscated both works as 'obscene'.

Darker realms

In a period of convalescence during 1793–94, Goya completed a set of eleven small pictures painted on tin; the pictures known as Fantasy and Invention mark a significant change in his art. These paintings no longer represent the world of popular carnival, but rather a dark, dramatic realm of fantasy and nightmare.

Courtyard with Lunatics is a horrifying and imaginary vision of loneliness, fear and social alienation, a departure from the rather more superficial treatment of mental illness in the works of earlier artists such as Hogarth. In this painting, the ground, sealed by masonry blocks and iron gate, is occupied by patients and a single warden. The patients are variously staring, sitting, posturing, wrestling, grimacing or disciplining themselves. The top of the picture vanishes with sunlight, emphasizing the nightmarish scene below.

This picture can be read as an indictment of the widespread punitive treatment of the insane, who were confined with criminals, put in iron manacles, and subjected to physical punishment. And this intention is to be taken into consideration since one of the essential goals of the enlightenment was to reform the prisons and asylums, a subject common in the writings of Voltaire and others. The condemnation of brutality towards prisoners (whether they were criminals or insane) was the subject of many of Goya’s later paintings.

As he completed this painting, Goya was himself undergoing a physical and mental breakdown. It was a few weeks after the French declaration of war on Spain, and Goya’s illness was developing. A contemporary reported, “the noises in his head and deafness aren’t improving, yet his vision is much better and he is back in control of his balance.” His symptoms may indicate a prolonged viral encephalitis or possibly a series of miniature strokes resulting from high blood pressure and affecting hearing and balance centers in the brain.

Other postmortem diagnostic assessment points toward paranoid dementia due to unknown brain trauma (perhaps due to the unknown illness which he reported). If this is the case, from here on - we see an insidious assault of his faculties, manifesting as paranoid features in his paintings, culminating in his black paintings and especially Saturn Devouring His Sons.

In 1799 he published a series of 80 prints titled Caprichos depicting what he called

“

...the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual.[7]

”

The Colossus, 1810.

In The Third of May, 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid, Goya attempted to "perpetuate by the means of his brush the most notable and heroic actions of our glorious insurrection against the Tyrant of Europe"^[8] The painting does not show an incident that Goya witnessed; rather it was meant as more abstract commentary.

Black Paintings and The Disasters

In later life Goya bought a house, called Quinta del Sordo ("Deaf Man's House"), and painted many unusual paintings on canvas and on the walls, including references to witchcraft and war. One of these is the famous work Saturn Devouring His Sons (known informally in some circles as Devoration or Saturn Eats His Child), which displays a Greco-Roman mythological scene of the god Saturn consuming a child, a reference to Spain's ongoing civil conflicts. Moreover, the painting has been seen as "the most essential to our understanding of the human condition in modern times, just as Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling is essential to understanding the tenor of the 16th century".^[9]

What more can one do?, from The Disasters of War, 1812-15.

This painting is one of 14 in a series called the Black Paintings. After his death the wall paintings were transferred to canvas and remain some of the best examples of the later period of Goya's life when, deafened and driven half-mad by what was probably an encephalitis of some kind, he decided to free himself from painterly strictures of the time and paint whatever nightmarish visions came to him. Many of these works are in the Prado museum in Madrid.

In the 1810s, Goya created a set of aquatint prints titled The Disasters of War (Los desastres de la guerra) which depict scenes from the Peninsular War. The scenes are singularly disturbing, sometimes macabre in their depiction of battlefield horror, and represent an outraged conscience in the face of death and destruction. The prints were not published until 1863, 35 years after Goya's death.

Among his pupils were Agustín Esteve.

Cinema, drama and opera

Remembrance plaque for Goya in Bordeaux

Several films portray Goya's life:

• Goya (1948) at the Internet Movie Database (short film)
• Goya, Historia de una Soledad -- Goya, historia de una soledad (1971) at the Internet Movie Database
• Goya in Bordeaux -- Goya in Bordeaux (1999) at the Internet Movie Database
• Volavérunt -- Volavérunt (1999) at the Internet Movie Database
• Goya's Ghosts (2006)

Enrique Granados composed a piano suite and later an opera called Goyescas inspired by the artist's paintings in 1916. Gian Carlo Menotti wrote a biographical opera about him titled Goya (1986), commissioned by Plácido Domingo, who originated the role; this production has been presented on television. He also inspired Michael Nyman's opera Facing Goya (2000), in which he appears in the present to protest the use of his skull in racist science, for which reason the historical Goya had his skull hidden and not buried with the rest of his body. Goya is the central character in Clive Barker's play Colossus.

In 1988 American musical theatre composer Maury Yeston released a studio cast album of his own musical, Goya: A Life In Song. Plácido Domingo again starred as Goya, with Jennifer Rush, Gloria Estefan, Joseph Cerisano, Dionne Warwick, Richie Havens, and Seiko Matsuda singing supporting roles. Music and lyrics were by Yeston, and the recording was released by CBS/Sony (483294-2). The score featured one break-out song, “Till I Loved You,” sung by Placido Domingo and Gloria Estefan. It was subsequently a Top 40 hit by Barbra Streisand. In spite of that commercial success, the piece has not received a major staging.

See also

• History of painting
• Western painting

References

• Goya (a biographical novel) by Lion Feuchtwanger ISBN 84-7640-883-8
• Goya by Robert Hughes, 2003, ISBN 1-84343-054-1
• eeweems.com Goya images, biography and resources

Footnotes

A statue of Francisco Goya outside the main entrance of The Prado Museum in Madrid.

1. ^ Goya and Modernism, Bienal Internacional de São Paulo Retrieved 27 July, 2007.
2. ^ Galeria de Arte transparencias Ancora A Todo Color 1961 Goya biography from the Museo del Prado. As quoted on eeweems.com
3. ^ Licht, Fred: Goya: The Origins of the Modern Temper in Art, page 68. Universe Books, 1979. "Even if one takes into consideration the fact that Spanish portraiture is often realistic to the point of eccentricity, Goya's portrait still remains unique in its drastic description of human bankruptcy".
4. ^ Rosario Weiss. Jose de la Mano Madrid Art Gallery.
5. ^ Licht, Fred, page 83, 1979.
6. ^ The Clothed Maja and the Nude Maja, the Prado Retrieved 27 July, 2007.
7. ^ The Sleep of Reason Linda Simon (www.worldandi.com). Retrieved 2 December 2006.
8. ^ Francisco Goya, quoted at Artchive.
9. ^ Licht, Fred, page 167, 1979.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes

General

• Goya images, biography and resources
• Goyas Ghosts 2006 film

Biographies

• Francisco de Goya at all-art.org
• Biography and Paintings of Francisco Goya

Works

• CaprichosPDF (10.0 MiB) (PDF in the Arno Schmidt Reference Library)
• Desastres de la guerraPDF (10.6 MiB) (PDF in the Arno Schmidt Reference Library)
• Caprichos at all-art.org
• Disasters of War at all-art.org
• Disparates at all-art.org
• Tauromaquia at all-art.org

Articles and essays

• The Sleep of Reason - article in World&I Magazine
• Goya's ghouls on the Goya's "Don't forget the happiness of Goya!" exhibition in Berlin
• Francisco de Goya's Black paintings
• Goya and his work in Aragon

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Persondata
NAME	Goya, Francisco
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Lucientes, Francisco José De La Goya y
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Aragonese Spanish painter and printmaker
DATE OF BIRTH	March 30 1746(1746--)
PLACE OF BIRTH	Fuendetodos
DATE OF DEATH	April 16 1828
PLACE OF DEATH	Bordeaux

pag:Francisco Goyaru-sib:Францыско Гоя

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