Francisco Goya

• 1. Introduction

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  Francisco Goya could not hear the French declaration of war on Spain. By then an undiagnosed illness had left him deaf, the noises in his head a constant torment. A contemporary reported that the deafness was not improving, yet his vision had cleared and his balance had returned. Out of that silence came monsters. Goya painted what he described as the innumerable foibles and follies of any civilized society, and he scrawled beneath one image that the sleep of reason produces monsters. He was born in 1746 in Fuendetodos, a village in Aragon, and he died in 1828 in Bordeaux, paralyzed on his right side by a stroke. Between those dates he served kings and ridiculed them, painted a profane nude that the Inquisition seized as obscene, and covered the plaster walls of his own house with images he never meant anyone to see. He is called the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns. How does one man come to occupy both titles? And what does an artist see when reason goes to sleep?

• 2. The Gilder's Son

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  Fuendetodos was not where the family began. The Goyas had moved there in 1746, the year Francisco was born, leaving the city of Zaragoza for reasons no record explains. His father, Jose Benito de Goya y Franque, was the son of a notary and of Basque origin, with ancestors from Zerain, and he earned his living as a gilder of religious and decorative craftwork. Jose had overseen the gilding during the rebuilding of the Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar, the principal cathedral of Zaragoza. Francisco was the fourth of six children, following his sisters Rita and Jacinta and his brother Tomas, who would take up their father's trade. His mother's family carried pretensions of nobility, and the modest brick cottage where Francisco was born belonged to them and perhaps fancifully bore their crest. Around 1749 his parents bought a home in Zaragoza and returned to the city. His schooling, possibly at the Escuelas Pias de San Anton, gave him reading, writing, numeracy, and some knowledge of the classics. The writer Robert Hughes judged that Goya seems to have taken no more interest than a carpenter in philosophical matters, and that his views on painting were very down to earth. At school he made a friend for life in Martin Zapater. The 131 letters Goya wrote to Zapater between 1775 and Zapater's death in 1803 became a rare window into the painter's early years at the court in Madrid.

• 3. Rome And Rejection

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  Twice Goya knocked on the door of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, in 1763 and again in 1766, and twice he was refused entry. He had begun studying at age 14 under the painter Jose Luzan, copying prints for four years before he decided, as he later put it, to paint from his invention. He moved to Madrid to study with Anton Raphael Mengs, a favorite of Spanish royalty, but clashed with his master and produced unsatisfactory examinations. Rome was then the cultural capital of Europe, holding the prototypes of classical antiquity, while Spain lacked any coherent artistic direction. Having failed to win a scholarship, Goya paid his own way to Rome, following a tradition of European artists that reached back at least to Albrecht Durer. He was unknown there, so the records are thin and uncertain. Early biographers spun him as a traveler arriving with a gang of bullfighters, working as a street acrobat or for a Russian diplomat, or plotting to abduct a beautiful young nun from her convent. He may have completed two mythological paintings during the visit, a Sacrifice to Vesta and a Sacrifice to Pan, both dated 1771. That same year he won second prize in a painting competition organized by the City of Parma, then returned to Zaragoza to paint elements of the cupolas of the Basilica of the Pillar.

• 4. Threads For The Crown

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  Some 42 patterns over five years: that was the labor that first carried Goya toward the royal household. His marriage in 1773 to Josefa Bayeu, whom he nicknamed Pepa, connected him to her brother Francisco Bayeu, whose standing and directorship of the tapestry works helped him win a commission for tapestry cartoons. The designs were used to decorate and insulate the stone walls of El Escorial and the Palacio Real del Pardo, residences of the Spanish monarchs. Designing tapestries was neither prestigious nor well paid, yet the rococo cartoons brought him to wider attention, reading like comments on human types, fashion, and fads. Alongside them he made engravings, mostly copies after old masters such as Marcantonio Raimondi and Diego Velazquez. His relationship with Velazquez was complicated. Many contemporaries saw folly in his attempts to emulate the long-dead painter, but the royal collection gave him access to a wide range of those works. His etching of around 1779, The Garrotted Man, was the largest he had yet produced and foreshadowed what was to come. He found the tapestry format limiting, unsuited to the impasto and glazing techniques he was applying to his painted works. Resourceful, he turned recurring illness to advantage, claiming it had given him insight to produce works that were more personal and informal.

• 5. Painter To Kings

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  In 1783 the Count of Floridablanca, favorite of King Charles III, commissioned Goya to paint his portrait, and the doors of the nobility swung open. He befriended the king's half-brother Luis and spent two summers painting the Infante and his family. His circle of patrons grew to include the Duke and Duchess of Osuna and others of the kingdom. In 1786 he gained a salaried position as painter to Charles III, and in 1789 he was appointed court painter to Charles IV. The following year he became First Court Painter, with a salary of 50,000 reales and an allowance of 500 ducats for a coach. His portraits are notable for their refusal to flatter. Charles IV of Spain and His Family reads as an especially brutal assessment, and modern interpreters view it as satire that exposes the corruption behind the king's rule. His wife Louisa was thought to hold the real power, so Goya placed her at the center of the group. From the back left the artist himself looks out at the viewer, and the painting hung behind the family depicts Lot and his daughters, echoing the message of decay. Among his sitters were Pedro Tellez-Giron, 9th Duke of Osuna, and the Spanish Prime Minister Manuel de Godoy. In 1801 he painted Godoy to commemorate victory in the War of the Oranges against Portugal. Even after Godoy's fall from grace, the politician spoke of the artist in warm terms.

• 6. The Sleep Of Reason

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  Between late 1792 and early 1793 the illness arrived that would deafen Goya and turn him inward. He grew withdrawn and introspective, and the tone of his work changed. Convalescing between 1793 and 1794, he completed eleven small pictures painted on tin, marking a shift toward the dark realms of fantasy and nightmare. Yard with Lunatics became a vision of loneliness, fear, and social alienation, condemning brutality toward prisoners whether criminal or insane. He admitted these were created to reflect his own self-doubt and fear that he was losing his mind, writing that they served to occupy his imagination, tormented as it was by contemplation of his sufferings. The cause has never been settled. Theories range from prolonged viral encephalitis, to a series of miniature strokes from high blood pressure, to Meniere's disease, to cumulative lead poisoning from the massive amounts of lead white he ground himself for his paintings. In 1799 he published 80 prints he called the Caprichos, depicting the foibles and deceitful practices that custom, ignorance, or self-interest had made usual. They were not solely bleak. They carried a sharp satirical wit, as in Capricho number 52, What a Tailor Can Do. That same year he painted the airy chapel scenes of San Antonio de la Florida, treating a miracle of Saint Anthony of Padua as a theatrical event performed by ordinary people.

• 7. A Flowering Of Rage

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  The French army invaded Spain in 1808, opening the Peninsular War that ran until 1814. Goya stayed in Madrid and kept neutral during the fighting, though he painted works for French patrons and sympathizers. How far he involved himself with the court of the intruder king, Joseph I, brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, is not known, and after the restoration of Ferdinand VII in 1814 he denied any involvement with the French. By the time his wife Josefa died in 1812, he was painting The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808 and preparing the etchings later known as The Disasters of War. Art historians read those etchings as a visual protest against the violence of the Dos de Mayo Uprising and the move against liberalism after the Bourbon restoration. The first 47 plates show the consequences of the conflict on individual soldiers and civilians. Plates 48 to 64 record the famine that struck Madrid in 1811-12 before the city was freed from the French. The final 17 reflect the bitter disappointment of liberals when the restored monarchy, encouraged by the Catholic hierarchy, rejected the Spanish Constitution of 1812. The series was not published until 1863-35 years after his death, when it was likely first considered politically safe to distribute artworks criticizing both the French and the restored Bourbons. Since then the scenes have been described as a prodigious flowering of rage.

• 8. The House Of The Deaf Man

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  On the plaster walls of a farmhouse outside Madrid, Goya painted 14 works he never intended anyone to exhibit. The house came to be called La Quinta del Sordo, the House of the Deaf Man, after a nearby farmhouse that had coincidentally belonged to another deaf man. He was 75, alone, tormented by a dread of old age and a fear of madness, painting in oil directly onto the walls. He never wrote of these Black Paintings and likely never spoke of them. Disillusioned by the developments that followed the 1814 restoration, he had hoped for political and religious reform and, like many liberals, became disillusioned when the monarchy and Catholic hierarchy rejected the Constitution of 1812. In 1824 he abandoned Spain to retire to Bordeaux, accompanied by Leocadia Weiss, his maid and companion, younger by 35 years and a distant relative. Her marriage to the jeweller Isidore Weiss had collapsed after he accused her of illicit conduct, and she was separated from him from 1811. In Bordeaux Goya completed his La Tauromaquia series of bullfighting scenes and other works before a stroke left him paralyzed on his right side. He died and was buried on the 16th of April 1828, aged 82. Leocadia, left nothing in his will, moved into rented rooms and later gave away her copy of the Caprichos for free. Around 1874-50 years after his death, the Black Paintings were taken down and transferred to canvas by the owner Baron Frederic Emile d'Erlanger, an operation that left most of the murals badly damaged. In 1919 Goya's body was re-interred in Madrid, but the skull was missing, and when the consul reported this, Madrid wired back: Send Goya, with or without head.