Francisco Goya

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This article is about Francisco Goya, a Spanish painter. For other uses of the name Goya, see Goya (disambiguation).

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

Goya was a portraitist and court painter to the Spanish Crown, a chronicler of history, and, in his unofficial work, a revolutionary and a visionary. 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.

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

1 Biography
2 Works
3 Cinema
4 References
5 External links

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Biography

Goya, a romantic artist whose art was envoked by his inner-most feelings, was born in Fuendetodos, in the province of Saragossa on the 30 March 1746 to Joseph Goya and Gracia Lucientes.

His childhood was spent in Fuendetodos where his family lived in the family house which bore the family crest of his mother, and which was surrounded by the dry lands where his father practiced the trade of gilder. About 1749 the family bought a house in the city of Saragossa and some years later moved into it.

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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 14 he entered apprenticeship with the painter Jose Lujan.

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 Spanish Royal Academy in 1763, and 1766, and both times he 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.

He returned to Saragossa in 1771 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.

Goya and Bayeu's sister, Josefa, married in 1774. His marriage to Josefa (Pepa he called her) gained him work with the Royal Tapestry Workshop where over five years he designed some 42 patterns. He also gained access to the royal court, painted a canvas for the altar of the Church of San Francisco El Grande, and was appointed a member of the Academy of San Fernando.

In 1783, the Count of Floridablanca, a favourite 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 Carlos III in 1788 and revolution in France in 1789, during the reign of Carlos IV, Goya reached his peak of popularity with royalty.

After an illness 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 Los Caprichos. The dark visions depicted in these prints are partly explained by his caption, "the sleep of reason produces monsters".

In 1799 he was appointed the Spanish royal 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.

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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.

King Ferdinand VII came back to Spain but relations with Goya were not cordial. In 1814 Goya lived with his cousin Rosario Weiss, and her daughter, Dona Leocadia, who he loved madly. 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, more enclosed within himself 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, but despite a warm welcome he returned to Bordeaux where he died on April 16 1828.

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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, fighting 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.

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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. He refused to paint clothes on her, and instead created a new painting. (See also: Majo.)

In a period of convalescence during 1793-94, he completed a set of 11 small pictures painted on tin, called the pictures of “Fantasy and Invention” that mark a 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.

This 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 heads and deafness aren’t improving, yet his vision is much better and he is back in control of his balance.”

In 1799 he created a series of 80 prints titled Los 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."[1]

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"<ref>Francisco Goya, quoted at Artchive.</ref> The painting does not show an incident that Goya witnessed; rather it was meant as more abstract commentary.

Another familiar Goya work is Saturn Devouring His Son, which displays a Greco-Roman mythological scene of the god Saturn consuming a child. This painting is one of 14 in a series called the Black Paintings. In the 1810s Goya created a set of aquatint prints titled Los Desatres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War) which depict scenes from the Peninsular War. The prints were published in 1863, 35 years after his death.

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