Francisco de Goya

Spanish painter

• Born: March 30, 1746
• Birthplace: Fuendetodos, Spain
• Died: April 16, 1828
• Place of death: Bordeaux, France

A painter and engraver, Goya was not only one of Spain’s greatest artists but also one of Western art’s most original practitioners. His aesthetic range was so comprehensive that he anticipated major artistic schools from the French Romantics to the German Expressionists.

Early Life

Francisco de Goya (frahn-THEES-koh thay GOH-yah) was born in the desolate hills of northeastern Spain, in the province of Aragon, a parched and barren land. His father was a gilder of Basque origin and was frequently unemployed. The family possessed little property, and poverty forced them to work in the fields to feed themselves. It was Goya’s lifelong terror of returning to the indigence of his early youth that later stimulated him to negotiate complex political maneuvers during several of Spain’s stormiest changes of government in order to retain his comfortable household. When Goya was five years old, his father moved the family to the nearby town of Saragossa, where the boy spent the rest of his youth.

Because of his family’s financial needs, the fourteen-year-old Goya was apprenticed to the highly successful church artist José Luzán. After four years of grinding colors, he began composing his own pictures, most of which were imitations of his master, Luzán; he also created skilled reproductions of paintings by old masters. It was also in Saragossa that Goya met and became close friends with Martin Zapater, a classmate. Their mutual correspondence over many years, though far from complete, provides the basis of historians’ knowledge of Goya’s complex personality. The years of hard and monotonous work that he spent in Luzán’s studio contributed to the characteristic rapidity and proficient technical craftsmanship that Goya was able to maintain throughout his creative life. He would become famous for his ability to complete a portrait during one long morning session. He corrected virtually nothing substantial because his hand and his eye were so practiced.

Despite his long years of grueling apprenticeship, Goya was unable to advance his career as quickly as he wished. In 1763 and 1766, he entered contests for scholarship admittance to the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid and failed both times. Frustrated and angry, he left Spain for Rome, where he assiduously studied, copied, and absorbed the influences of the Italian masters, particularly Correggio and the Venetian Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Indeed, many critics attribute the warmer and richer colors in Goya’s paintings of this period to Tiepolo’s influence.

Another, possibly more compelling reason for Goya’s quick departure from Spain was the increasing pressure he and other free-spirited liberals were under from the reactionary proponents of the Inquisition. The Italians were considerably more appreciative of the young artist’s talents and awarded him second prize in a contest sponsored by the Academy of Art of Parma in 1770. It seems that Goya then left Rome suddenly, because he had become involved in several exciting but dangerous romantic escapades, a habit he never relinquished.

After ten years of neglect and failure, Goya’s dogged tenacity prevailed, and he managed to gain recognition outside his own country. He returned to Saragossa and was promptly commissioned to paint frescoes in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Pillar. He had returned home with honor and now had a promising project that would last for the next ten years. Goya painted the commissioned frescoes in the prevailing Baroque-rococo style of the day but was still able to lend his personal touch to them; they were, even at this early stage in his career, unmistakably Goya’s work.

From 1770 to 1773, the young artist pursued further studies with the well-known and highly influential painter Francisco Bayeu, a fellow Aragonese. He married Bayeu’s sister, Josefa, in 1773, a move that did nothing to hurt his steadily growing reputation. Indeed, it was through his brother-in-law that Goya received an important commission to create the enormous mural paintings of the Carthusian Charterhouse of Auli Dei in Saragossa, work that dramatically caught the attention and respect of both the artistic and the royal community in Madrid. Again, because of the influence of Bayeu, Goya was summoned to Madrid in 1774 by the reigning artistic dictator of the court of Charles III, the powerful German-Czech exponent of neoclassicism, Anton Raphael Mengs. Mengs commissioned him to participate in preparing fifty cartoons to be submitted to the royal tapestry factory of Santa Barbara, a project that brought him into direct contact with King Charles III and the royal household. By 1774, the twenty-eight-year-old Goya found himself at the threshold of a career that would eventually lead him to the post of first painter to the king.

Life’s Work

The year 1775 marked two significant events in Goya’s life. One was the birth of his son, Xavier, the only one of his children to live beyond infancy. The other was the painting of his first self-portrait, a strikingly optimistic one that would turn out to be the first of many. He also drew cartoons for the tapestry factory of Santa Barbara that demonstrated the emergence, in a relatively short time, of his own, unique style. To achieve this style, Goya had to overcome an initial aesthetic timidity and to stop trying to imitate the flaccid neoclassicism of his brother-in-law. With his success in these endeavors, Goya not only forged a new phase of Spanish art that started with El Greco but also managed to imprint his own character on everything he touched. Several of the Santa Barbara cartoons have come to be thought of as exemplary of Goya’s early phase, notably The Parasol and The Washerwoman.

During this early phase, from 1776 to 1780, Goya was received into the court of the intelligent and kindly Charles III and given the opportunity to examine in depth the royal collection of paintings. The first and perhaps most revolutionary influence he was to encounter in the collection was the work of Diego Velázquez. The influence of the latter upon Goya was immediate and permanent. Goya’s subsequent paintings displayed a deft handling of reflected light and atmospheric effects that had been absent from his earlier pictures. Goya stated on several occasions that he acknowledged only three masters: “Rembrandt, Velázquez, and Nature!” His adaptations of effects and techniques from earlier masters eventually enabled him to synthesize the neoclassical and Baroque-rococo elements in his work into his own, quasi-Romantic treatment of even the most banal subjects.

Late in the next decade, after winning several competitions and gaining important positions in the Royal Academy of San Fernando, Goya became painter of the royal household under Charles IV (r. 1788-1808), Charles III’s considerably less sensitive and more frivolous son. The work that was to win for him these lucrative positions was a series of portraits he had begun in 1783. The first, Portrait of the Count of Floridablanca, secured nationwide fame for Goya. It was also the first major portrait in which he portrayed himself, an act simultaneously imitating and paying tribute to his spiritual master Velázquez. It was also an unmistakable sign that Goya saw himself, quite consciously, as the next successor in a line of great Spanish painters beginning with El Greco and Velázquez.

Other portraits followed quickly, and Goya’s work was in great demand by every level of the aristocracy. It was in these portraits, particularly the justly famous Portrait of Don Manuel Orsorio (1788) and The Duke and Duchess of Osuna (1789), that Goya successfully developed a quality of luminescent impressionism that ultimately became his hallmark. With this quality, he managed to avoid any suggestion of mere prettiness or sentimentality but at the same time beautified, without decorating, his sense of the world about him.

Just as Goya was concluding his work on the tapestries of Santa Barbara, he contracted a mysterious malady that manifested itself in the form of enormous noises in his head. The illness, along with the monstrous sounds, eventually disappeared but left him permanently deaf. Critics have theorized that, like Ludwig van Beethoven’s deafness, Goya’s terrible misfortune isolated him from much of society, whose darling he had been up to that point. At the same time, however, the deafness deepened the content of Goya’s works, and his isolation forced him into areas beyond the realm of mere, albeit brilliant, portraiture.

It was shortly after his recovery from the illness that robbed him of his hearing that Goya began a series of etchings, the first of three extended studies that have come to be considered his major intellectual contributions not only to eighteenth century art but also to the general history of ideas and images of Western Europe. He called the series The Caprices (1793-1796), and it consisted of eighty aquatint etchings detailing with satiric savagery humankind’s inhumanity to humankind and “existence as catastrophe.” The etchings employed techniques and procedures that would later be called surrealistic and expressionistic, modes that recalled the hallucinatory terror of Hieronymus Bosch. They expressed a sense of existential emptiness, but one in which the void is actively corrosive. The etchings presented humans as victims of not only all ideologies and beliefs but also the pincers of their own minds. In retrospect, the etchings became prophetic warnings of what civilization was sliding into during the eighteenth century.

Although The Caprices became the map of his own and Europe’s fall into spiritual torpor, Goya’s career as a portrait painter flourished as he produced what would later be regarded as prototypical Goyaesque works. His relationship with the royal house of Alba and specifically his love for the duchess of Alba, who may or may not have been his actual lover, inspired two masterpieces portraying the duchess and spilled over into two even more famous portraits that unquestionably established his reputation, the stunningly sensuous The Clothed Maja and The Naked Maja.

The climax of Goya’s career occurred with his appointment as first court painter in 1799, the same year in which he produced the two Maja paintings. The artist had been waiting and maneuvering at court for this appointment for years. The year after he finally received it, he produced what most critics see as his greatest single painting: Portrait of the Family of King Charles IV. In this huge work, he accomplished the task of rendering the members of this venal, not very bright, and distinctly ugly family with pitiless accuracy. A more sensitive and intelligent patron and his family would have been highly insulted, but Goya’s genius was so sure-handed that he was able to blind the royal family to their own ineffectual self-indulgence while demonstrating it to the rest of the world. Moreover, he vividly portrayed the disastrous effects that genetic inbreeding, both physical and spiritual, had had on the great house of Bourbon and, by implication, the equally destructive forces that were bringing all the great houses of Europe to ruin within the next fifty years. In this single magnificent portrait, Goya verified the beginning of the end of what had started as the Holy Roman Empire in 800 c.e.

With the death of the duchess of Alba and the chaos created by the Franco-Spanish War, Goya began his second series of etchings, known as The Disasters of War (1810). These further deepened and certified the despair of The Caprices but depicted the horrors of the atrocities, agonies, and starvation of actual war. By 1814, Goya had painted perhaps the greatest and most compelling images of war in all of Western art, The Executions of May Second and The Executions of May Third. Both series of etchings and the execution paintings demonstrated a darkening of Goya’s vision, a darkening that produced its most despairing depictions in his final series of etchings, known as The Proverbs (1815-1816).

In The Proverbs, Goya expressed his profound grief and dismay in eighteen viciously satiric allegories that seem to be utterly disengaged from any rational foundations. His penultimate statement on the human condition he saved for the walls of his own house, which he named Quinta del Sordo (House of the Deaf Man). He called these works The Black Paintings, and they depict apocalyptically hallucinatory visions that seem to foretell the fall of Western civilization. The delirium of these paintings is so great that it almost seems as though they could have been rendered by Salvador Dali or Pablo Picasso in either artist’s most surreal period.

During the Peninsular War (1808-1814), Goya had remained at court and painted under the occupying French government that had been installed in power by Napoleon I. Once Spain regained its independence and Ferdinand VII took back his throne, Goya feared reprisals and exiled himself to France temporarily. Once he saw that it was safe, though, he returned and was received kindly by Ferdinand VII, who gave Goya a hefty pension for life. Goya found life under the new regime too repressive, however, and moved back to Bordeaux, where he produced his final masterpiece. He returned to the subject of his youth, the common folk, and created The Milkmaid of Bordeaux (1827), a work that brought together all the styles within which he had worked and created, centering them within an autumnal but hopeful serenity. He died peacefully at age eighty-two on April 16, 1828.

Significance

Francisco de Goya shared with the English poet and engraver William Blake and the great German composer Ludwig van Beethoven the unenviable position of connecting two of the stormiest centuries of the Christian era: the eighteenth and the nineteenth, the Age of Enlightenment and the Romantic Age. He, like the other two geniuses, was more than a mere transitional figure. His work, because of the vividly regenerative power of his imagination, created an intellectual and spiritual world in which the work of later great French artists such as Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Géricault, and Honoré Daumier could draw sustenance and find validation. Goya’s major achievement was, in short, the enlargement of the possibilities of the Western imagination to an almost limitless degree. Like Beethoven in his early formalistic work, Goya moved from safe traditional forms into later projects where form and content became extensions of each other. In one dramatic lifetime, Goya advanced art from the highly traditional Baroque-rococo to the openness and complexity of the Romantic mode, which, in turn, made possible the modern sensibility.

Goya’s direct influences on later artists are varied and sometimes remarkably surprising. His work prefigures that of Delacroix by embodying the principle that the personal is always the political, certainly a controlling idea in Delacroix’s and other Romantics’ work. Goya’s sardonic satires paved the way for the work of another French social satirist, Daumier, while his impeccable handling of light and shade and his uniquely luminescent textures undoubtedly influenced the major French Impressionists, such as Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Indeed, Manet derived from Goya’s The Executions of May Third his own Execution of Maximilian, and he offered no apologies. Finally, Goya’s nightmarish and hallucinatory etchings, The Proverbs, The Caprices, and The Disasters of War, unquestionably anticipate the work of such major nineteenth and twentieth century European Expressionists as Käthe Kollwitz, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, and Paul Klee. Without Goya’s aesthetic permission, his fellow Spanish surrealists, Picasso and Dali, could not have flourished. Goya was unquestionably one of the major revolutionary figures in the history of European art, and his rich legacy continues to resonate.

Bibliography

Chabrun, Jean-François. Goya. Translated by J. Maxwell Brown John. New York: Tudor, 1965. A highly readable novelistic narrative with much biographical information. Amply illustrated with both color and black-and-white prints. Excellent for beginners.

Connell, Evan S. Francisco Goya. New York: Counterpoint Press, 2004. Connell uses Goya’s career to illustrate the decline of Spain by the end of the eighteenth century. Offers little analysis of Goya’s art, but provides a lively, well-researched account of his life.

Glendinning, Nigel. Goya and His Critics. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977. The most intelligent treatment of the artist from the point of view of his place and influence within the history of art and European intellectual traditions. The author has spent much effort in tracking down every reference to Goya in the works of many other artists.

Goya, Francisco de. Goya. Text by José Gudiol. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1965. A handsome volume with vivid and exceptionally well-produced reproductions of many of Goya’s major masterpieces. The introduction traces Goya’s life chronologically and offers intelligent, if sometimes stuffy, analyses of the works.

Hughes, Robert. Goya. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. An interpretive biography by a prominent art historian. Hughes traces Goya’s development as a person and artist and analyzes his work.

Klingender, Francis D. Goya in the Democratic Tradition. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. An unashamedly partisan treatment of Goya in relation to his intellectual and social background. Thoroughly grounded in historical fact and stimulating.

Lewis, D. B. Wyndham. The World of Goya. London: Michael Joseph, 1968. Tends to be told in a quasi-novelistic narrative but done with much closer adherence to historical facts than Chabrun’s work. Excellent cross-reference system. Densely illustrated.

Licht, Fred. Goya: The Origins of Modern Temper in Art. New York: Universe Books, 1979. A comprehensive and scholarly book that is unfortunately marred by illustrations in black and white only. Each chapter is concerned with only one group of works—cartoons, religious paintings, and so on—thus helping the reader focus on the similarities and differences found within the groups. Extremely helpful and thoroughly grounded in historical facts.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. Goya in Perspective. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973. An intelligent and comprehensive collection of essays written by art critics and historians. The essays offer a variety of views on Goya, from the poetic to the sociological.

Tomlinson, Janis A. Francisco Goya y Lucientes, 1746-1828. London: Phaidon, 1999. Tomlinson, who has written several books about Goya and Spanish art, discounts the popular theory that Goya’s art darkened after he became deaf. She emphasizes the continuity of his work before and after his illness, and she shows how his deafness strengthened his resolve to explore and use his creativity.