Goya, an account of his life and works

by Albert Frederick Calvert

GOYA

AN ACCOUNT OF HIS LIFE
AND WORKS BY ALBERT F.
CALVERT, WITH 612 RE-
PRODUCTIONS FROM HIS
PICTURES, ETCHINGS, AND
LITHOGRAPHS

LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMVIII

To
THE MARQUIS OF COMILLAS

My dear Marquis,

I beg you to accept the dedication of this volume as a mark of the high value I place upon your friendship, and as a sincere expression of my esteem for yourself as a patron of the arts, a true philanthropist, and a lifelong worker in the interests of Spanish greatness.

I am, my dear Marquis,
Your sincere and obliged,
ALBERT F. CALVERT.

Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty

PREFACE

It has been said that in England everybody knows of Cervantes, but very few persons have more than a nodding acquaintance with Don Quixote, and Goya’s reputation in this country is even less securely founded. The great Aragonese is indeed little more than a name to the general public, and his work is literally unknown. Two little books—Mr. W. Rothenstein’s Goya, now out of print, and a monograph by Mr. Richard Muther in the Langham Series—are the only volumes in English dealing exclusively with a painter who for more than half a century might have been described, with more aptness than that with which the words were applied to Zurbarán, as ‘All Spain.’ As sincere a lover and as brilliant a transcriber of the beautiful as Watteau and Van Loo, a greater realist than Hogarth, and in portraiture second only to Velazquez, Goya stands out as the greatest artist Spain has produced since the death of the great Court painter of Philip IV.

The fact that Spanish art reflects the aspirations and is largely concerned with the representation of scenes selected by its chief patron, the Spanish Catholic Church, accounts, in some measure, for the lack of sympathy and appreciation with which it is regarded in this country, but this prejudice does not explain the neglect from which Goya has suffered. Goya, it is true, accepted commissions from the Church, but his religious subjects do not comprise a tenth of his canvases, and in his etchings and engravings he is seen only as a secular moralist. As the painter of the Spanish Rococo period, he dipped his brush in beauty, gaiety, and humour; as a portraitist he was vivid, surprising, audacious, a maker of masterpieces; while his etchings constitute an unrivalled commentary upon the spirit of the age, recorded by its ‘most fearless and advanced thinker.’

Goya’s art would appear to be the reflection of his life. His youth was disordered and tempestuous; in the height of his success he accepted favours, but he was too conscientious an artist to repay the adulation of the world by flattering it in his canvases; and he published his disillusions in the biting satire of his Caprices and Proverbs.

The authorities I have consulted would make a formidable list, but among those to whom I am under special obligation I must mention the ‘Lives’ of Goya by the Conde de la Viñaza, Paul Lefort, Paul Lafond, W. Rothenstein, Richard Muther and Julius Hofmann; Valerian von Loga’s works on Goya’s etchings and engravings; Don Juan de la Rada’s chapter on ‘Goya’s Frescoes in the Church of San Antonio de la Florida;’ Muther’s appreciation of Goya in his History of Modern Painting; Stirling-Maxwell’s Annals of the Artists of Spain; Carl Justi’s ‘Sketch of Spanish Art’ in Baedeker’s Spain and Portugal; C. Gasquoine Hartley’s Spanish Painting; the Boletin de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones; and Théophile Gautier’s brilliant study of Goya in his Travels in Spain.

In making the collection of Goya’s works that is presented at the end of this volume, I have taken the line of least resistance and included reproductions of every picture, etching, or lithograph that I could acquire. However inadequate photography and ‘process’ may be to convey an impression of the original works, I have endeavoured to give English students an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the subjects and general nature of much of the output of Goya’s sixty years of artistic effort.

In the compilation of the appended exhaustive catalogue of Goya’s works, which I am not without hope may be found of practical value, I have derived no little assistance from Spanish and German publications and from the list prepared by M. Paul Lafond. To Señor Don Mariano Moreno, who has made a special study of Goya and his work, I am indebted for descriptions of many pictures which are published here for the first time, and my thanks are also due to him for permission to reproduce from his collection a number of photographs which were new to me. I have also to acknowledge the kindness of the authorities of the Academy of San Fernando in allowing me to publish copies of the different prints of Goya’s works issued by the Academy; and to express my thanks to Señor Don J. Lacoste, Messrs. Braun, Clement and Co., Messrs. Mansell and Co., and Herr Franz Hanfstaengl, for their courtesy in supplying me with various pictures included in this collection and permitting me to reproduce them.

A. F. C.

ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATE	SUBJECT	GALLERY
[1.]	The Family of Charles IV.,	Prado, Madrid.
[2.]	The Infante Don Carlos,	Prado, Madrid.
[3.]	The Infante Francisco de Paula Antonio,	Prado, Madrid.
[4.]	The Infanta Maria Josefa,	Prado, Madrid.
[5.]	The Infante Don Antonio,	Prado, Madrid.
[6.]	The Infante Don Carlos Maria Isidro,	Prado, Madrid.
[7.]	King Charles IV.,	Ministerio de Hacienda, Madrid.
[8.]	King Charles IV.,	Ministerio de Hacienda, Madrid.
[9.]	King Charles IV.,
[10.]	King Charles IV.,	Royal Palace, Madrid.
[11.]	King Charles IV.,	Prado, Madrid.
[12.]	King Charles IV.,	Marques de Casa Torres, Madrid.
[13.]	Queen Maria Luisa,	Don A. de Beruete, Madrid.
[14.]	Queen Maria Luisa,	Don José Lázan.
[15.]	Queen Maria Luisa,	Ministerio de Hacienda, Madrid.
[16.]	Queen Maria Luisa,	Marques de Casa Torres, Madrid.
[17.]	Queen Maria Luisa,	Prado, Madrid.
[18.]	Queen Maria Luisa,	Prado, Madrid.
[19.]	Ferdinand VII.,	Academy of St. Ferdinand, Madrid.
[20.]	Ferdinand VII.,	Prado, Madrid.
[21.]	Ferdinand VII.,	Prado, Madrid.
[22.]	Ferdinand VII.,	Ancient Collection of Eustaquio Veate.
[23.]	Don Luis, Prince of Parma,	Prado, Madrid.
[24.]	Duchess of Abrantes,	Duquesa de Abrantes, Madrid.
[25.]	Duchess of Alba,	Don Rafael Barrio.
[26.]	Duchess of Alba,	Palacio de Liria, Madrid.
[27.]	Duchess of Alba,	Duque de Alba, Madrid.
[28.]	Duchess of Alba,
[29.]	Condesa de Altamira and Daughter,	Marques de Cervera.
[30.]	Count of Altamira,	Bank of Spain, Madrid.
[31.]	The Infante Don Luis de Borbon,	Marques de Casa Torres, Madrid.
[32.]	Altamirano, Auditor of Seville,	Marques de la Vega Inclan.
[33.]	Don Manuel Lapeña, Marques de Bondad Real,	Don Joaquin Argamanilla.
[34.]	Marquesa de Caballero,	Marques de Cervera.
[35.]	Conde de Cabarrus,	Bank of Spain, Madrid.
[36.]	The Wife of Cean Bermudez,	Marques de Casa Torres, Madrid.
[37.]	J. Cean Bermudez,	Marques de Casa Torres, Madrid.
[38.]	Doña Lorenzo Correa,	M. Bischoffsheim, Paris.
[39.]	The Toreador Costillares,	Don José Lazaro.
[40.]	Don Joaquin Maria Ferrer,	Count of Candilla.
[41.]	Condesa-Duquesa de Benavente y Osuna,	Madrid.
[42.]	Doña Manuela de Alvarez Coiñas,	Marquis of Baroja.
[43.]	Florida Blanca,	Marquesa de Martorell.
[44.]	Don Antonio Foraster,	Don J. Millan.
[45.]	The Engineer Ignacio Garcini,	The Garcini Family, Madrid.
[46.]	Doña Josefa Castilla-Portugal,	Don Vicente Garcini.
[47.]	Don Juan Antonio Cuervo,	Don F. Duran.
[48.]	Doña Maria Ildefonso Dabalos,	Count of Villagonzalo.
[49.]	General Don Juan Marlin,	Don Luis Navas.
[50.]	Godoy, Prince of the Peace,	Academy of St. Ferdinand, Madrid.
[51.]	F. Guillemardet,	Louvre, Paris.
[52.]	Jaspar Melchor de Jovellanos,	Marquesa de Villamajor, Madrid.
[53.]	Asensio Julia,	Comtesse de Paris.
[54.]	The Milkmaid of Bordeaux,	Condesa Vinda de Muguiro.
[55.]	Asensio Julia,	Louvre, Paris.
[56.]	Marquesa de Lazan,	Comtesse de Montijo.
[57.]	Don Francisco Larrumbe,	Bank of Spain, Madrid.
[58.]	The Bookseller of the Calle de Carretas,	Don Benito Garriga.
[59.]	Don J. Antonio Llorente,	Don Francisco Llorente y Garcia de Vinuesa.
[60.]	Duke of San Carlos,	Marques de la Torrecilla.
[61.]	Duke of San Carlos,	Conde de Villagonzalo.
[62.]	The Actor Isidoro Maiquez,	Prado, Madrid.
[63.]	The Actor Isidoro Maiquez,	Marques de Casa Torres, Madrid.
[64.]	Countess of Miranda del Castañar,	Formerly in the Montijo Collection.
[65.]	Conde de Miranda,
[66.]	Leandro Fernandez de Moratin,	Academy of St. Ferdinand, Madrid.
[67.]	The Family of the Countess of Montijo,	Palacio de Liria, Madrid.
[68.]	Señor J. B. de Muguiro,	Condesa Vinda de Muguiro.
[69.]	Marques de Castro Terreño,
[70.]	Marquesa de Castro Terreño,
[71.]	Camarón,	Doña E. Camarón.
[72.]	Muñarriz,	Academy of St. Ferdinand, Madrid.
[73.]	Duke of Osuna and Family,	Prado, Madrid.
[74.]	Admiral Mazaredo,	Don M. Hernando.
[75.]	Meléndez Valdés,	Señor Suárez Inclán.
[76.]	Duke of Osuna,	Formerly in the Collection of the Duke of Osuna.
[77.]	Duke of Osuna,	Marquesa de Villamajor, Madrid.
[78.]	Duke of Osuna,	M. Duniat, Paris.
[79.]	Duke of Osuna,	Formerly in the Palace of the Duque de Osuna, Madrid.
[80.]	Duquesa del Parque,	Marques de la Vega, Madrid.
[81.]	Doctor Peral,	National Gallery, London.
[82.]	General Palafox,	Prado, Madrid.
[83.]	Doña Isabel Corbo de Porcel,	National Gallery, London.
[84.]	Don Tiburcio Perez,	D. F. Duran and Cuervo.
[85.]	Don Mariano Luis de Urquijo,	Academy of History, Madrid.
[86.]	Don Tomás Pérez Estala,	Countess of Cedillo.
[87.]	Don Pantaleón Perez de Nenin,	Don P. Labat.
[88.]	Marquesa de Pontejos,	Marquesa de Martorell.
[89.]	Don Ramón Pignatelli,	Duquesa de Villahermosa.
[90.]	General Ricardos,	Madrid.
[91.]	The Toreador José Romero,	Madrid.
[92.]	Marques de San Adrián,	Collection of the Family.
[93.]	The Espada Pedro Romero,	Duque de Veragua.
[94.]	Ramon Satue,	Dr. Benito Garriga.
[95.]	Don Manuel Silvela,	Don F. Silvela.
[96.]	Doña Maria Teresa Apodaca de Sesma,	Don Andres Arteta.
[97.]	Marquesa de la Solana,	Marques del Socorro.
[98.]	General Urrutia,	Prado, Madrid.
[99.]	Maria del Rosario Fernandez,	Academy of St. Ferdinand, Madrid.
[100.]	Maria del Rosario Fernandez,	Conde de Villagonzalo.
[101.]	Marques de Tolosa,	Bank of Spain, Madrid.
[102.]	Conde de Teba,	Don J. Lázaro.
[103.]	José de Vargas Ponce,	Academy of History, Madrid.
[104.]	Don José de Toro Zambrano,	Bank of Spain, Madrid.
[105.]	Doña Antonia Zarate,	Señora Vinda de Albacete.
[106.]	Doña Antonia Zarate,	Señora Vinda de Albacete.
[107.]	Doña Lola Zimenez,	M. Chiramy, Paris.
[108.]	Don Evaristo Perez de Castro,	Louvre, Paris.
[109.]	Don Juan José Mateo Arias Dairla,	Marquesa de Almaguer.
[110.]	Father Lascanal,	Don J. Lázaro.
[111.]	Don Ramon de Posada y Soto,	Don José Maria Perez Caballero.
[112.]	Marques de Caballero,	Marques de Cervera, Madrid.
[113.]	Conde de Gazinza,	Marques de Casa Torres, Madrid.
[114.]	Moratin,	Don F. Silvela.
[115.]	The Artist,	Academy of St. Ferdinand, Madrid.
[116.]	The Artist,	Don A. Pidal.
[117.]	The Artist,
[118.]	The Artist,	M. Leon Bonnet.
[119.]	The Artist, by Vicente Lopez,	Prado, Madrid.
[120.]	Don J. B. de Goicoechea,	Don Felipe Modet.
[121.]	Goya’s Grandson,	Marques de Alcañices.
[122.]	Doña Feliciana Bayeu,	Don C. Ferriz.
[123.]	Don Juan Martin de Goicoechea,	Marques de Casa Torres, Madrid.
[124.]	Doña Narcisa Barañona de Goicoechea,	Don Felipe Modet.
[125.]	Doña Juana Galarza de Goicoechea,	Marques de Casa Torres, Madrid.
[126.]	Francisco Bayeu,	Prado, Madrid.
[127.]	Josefa Bayeu,	Prado, Madrid.
[128.]	Group of Heads,	Comtesse de Paris.
[129.]	Portrait Study of a Woman,
[130.]	Portrait of a Young Girl,	Private Property.
[131.]	Portrait of a Lady,
[132.]	Portrait of a Lady,	Conde de Peñalvez.
[133.]	Portrait of a Lady,	Don José Lázaro.
[134.]	Portrait of a Lady,	Don A. de Beruete.
[135.]	Portrait of a Lady,	Don A. de Beruete.
[136.]	Portrait of a Lady,	Don A. de Beruete.
[137.]	Portrait of a Lady,	Don R. Garcia.
[138.]	Portrait of a Woman,	Louvre, Paris.
[139.]	A Little Girl,	Marques de Casa Torres, Madrid.
[140.]	Portrait of a Lady,	Don J. Gutierrez Martin.
[141.]	Young Spanish Woman,	Louvre, Paris.
[142.]	Portrait of a Man,	Private Collection.
[143.]	The Old Man,	Conde de Da. Marina.
[144.]	Portrait of an Architect,
[145.]	Portrait of a Doctor,
[146.]	Portrait of a Lady,
[147.]	Portrait of a Lady,
[148.]	Portrait of a Lady,
[149.]	Portrait of a Lady,
[150.]	Portrait of a Man,
[151.]	Portrait of a Lady,	Señor Orossen.
[152.]	Portrait of a Lady,
[153.]	Portrait of a Gentleman,
[154.]	Charles IV.,	Comtesse de Paris.
[155.]	Queen Maria Luisa,	Comtesse de Paris.
[156.]	The Infanta Isabel,	Comtesse de Paris.
[157.]	Portrait of a Man,
[158.]	Don Felix Colon,	Don Ricardo Traumann, Madrid.
[159.]	Don Felix Colon,	Don Ricardo Traumann, Madrid.
[160.]	Portrait of a Man,
[161.]	Portrait of a Boy,
[162.]	Portrait of a Boy,
[163.]	Portrait of a Boy,
[164.]	Portrait of a Lady,
[165.]	Portrait of a Lady,
[166.]	Portrait of a Lady,
[167.]	Portrait of a Young Lady,	Mons. C. G., Paris.
[168.]	Episode of the French Invasion of 1808,	Prado, Madrid.
[169.]	Episode of the French Invasion of 1808,	Duquesa de Villahermosa.
[170.]	Casting Bullets by Moonlight in the Hills of Tardienta,	Royal Palace, Madrid.
[171.]	Scenes of the 2nd May 1808,	Prado, Madrid.
[172.]	Battle-Scene,	Marques de Casa Torres, Madrid.
[173.]	Manufacturing Powder in the Sierra de Tardienta,	Royal Palace, Madrid.
[174.]	The Tribunal of the Inquisition,	Prado, Madrid.
[175.]	The Procession of Flagellants,	Academy of St. Ferdinand, Madrid.
[176.]	A Meeting of the Company of the Philippines,
[177.]	The City of Madrid: an Allegory,	Corporation of Madrid.
[178.]	Music: an Allegory,	Don Luis Navas.
[179.]	Spain making History,	Don Luis Navas.
[180.]	The Madhouse,	Prado, Madrid.
[181.]	The Majas of the Balcony,	Duque de Marchesa.
[182.]	The Majas of the Balcony,
[183.]	The Majas of the Balcony,
[184.]	La Maja (Nude),	Prado, Madrid.
[185.]	La Maja (Clothed),	Prado, Madrid.
[186.]	The Knife-Grinder,	Budapest.
[187.]	The Water-Carrier,	Budapest.
[188.]	Old Age,	Lille Museum.
[189.]	Robbery of a Coach,	Marques de Castro Serna.
[190.]	Brigands,	Marques de la Romana.
[191.]	Brigand murdering a Woman,	Marques de la Romana.
[192.]	Brigands stripping their Captives,	Marques de la Romana.
[193.]	Murder by Brigands,	Marques de la Romana.
[194.]	Brigands’ Cave,	Marques de la Romana.
[195.]	Goya and the Duchess of Alba,	Marques de la Romana.
[196.]	The Plague Terror,	Marques de la Romana.
[197.]	The Monk’s Visit,	Marques de la Romana.
[198.]	A Masquerade,	Duquesa de Villahermosa.
[199.]	The Dance,	Marques de la Torrecilla.
[200.]	The Funeral of the Sardine,	Academy of St. Ferdinand, Madrid.
[201.]	The Booth at the Fair,	Marques de Castro Serna.
[202.]	The Greasy Pole,	Marques de Castro Torres.
[203.]	The Bonfire,	Conde de Villagonzalo.
[204.]	Nocturnal Scene,	Marques de la Romana.
[205.]	The Picnic,	Marques de la Torrecilla.
[206.]	The Inundation,	Marques de Castro Serna.
[207.]	The Village on Fire,	Marques de Castro Serna.
[208.]	Caprice,	Doña C. Berganza de Martin.
[209.]	Caprice,	Doña C. Berganza de Martin.
[210.]	Caprice,	Don A. Pidal.
[211.]	Dogs and Guns: Design for Tapestry,	Prado, Madrid.
[212.]	A Dead Bird,	Prado, Madrid.
[213.]	Dead Birds,	Prado, Madrid.
[214.]	A Picador on Horseback,	Prado, Madrid.
[215.]	Picador and Bull,	Marques de Baroja.
[216.]	Death of the Picador,	Paris.
[217.]	A Bull-Fight,	Bequeathed to the Royal Academy, Madrid.
[218.]	A Bull escaped from the Arena,	Duque de Veragua.
[219.]	Meeting of Witches,	Prado, Madrid.
[220.]	Galician Shepherds fighting,	Prado, Madrid.
[221.]	The Procession,	Conde de Candilla.
[222.]	Caprice,	Prado, Madrid.
[223.]	The Fates,	Prado, Madrid.
[224.]	Saturn devouring one of his Children,	Prado, Madrid.
[225.]	Judith and Holofernes,	Prado, Madrid.
[226.]	Two Monks,
[227.]	The Maja,	From Goya’s Country House near Madrid.
[228.]	A Caprice,
[229.]	Listening to the News,	Prado, Madrid.
[230.]	A Group of Witches,	Prado, Madrid.
[231.]	A Group of Witches,	Prado, Madrid.
[232.]	The Bull-Fight,
[233.]	Pilgrimage to the Fountain of San Isidro,	Prado, Madrid.
[234.]	Meeting of Witches,	Prado, Madrid.
[235.]	Two Old People eating Porridge,	Prado, Madrid.
[236.]	The Mass of Parida,	Marques de la Torrecilla.
[237.]	The Topers,
[238.]	Women of Madrid, and Friars,	Marques de Casa Torres.
[239.]	The Majas and the Majo,
[240.]	The Witch,
[241.]	Laughing Women,	Prado, Madrid.
[242.]	The Swing,	Duke de Montellano.
[243.]	The Greasy Pole,	Duke de Montellano.
[244.]	The Accident,	Duke de Montellano.
[245.]	Coach attacked by Bandits,	Duke de Montellano.
[246.]	Building the Church,	From the Collection of the Duque de Osuna.
[247.]	The Village Procession,	From the Collection of the Duque de Osuna.
[248.]	Summer: Threshers of Wheat,	Don Ricardo Traumann.
[249.]	The Hermitage of San Isidro,	Don P. F. Durán.
[250.]	The Wounded Mason,	Don P. F. Durán.
[251.]	The Hermitage of San Isidro,	Prado, Madrid.
[252.]	Scene from the Play ‘El hechizado por fuerza’—The Bewitched,	National Gallery, London.
[253.]	The Picnic,	National Gallery, London.
[254.]	Herd of Bulls coming from the Muñoza,	From the Collection of the Duque de Osuna.
[255.]	A Caprice,	From the Collection of the Duque de Osuna.
[256.]	A Witches’ Conventicle,	From the Collection of the Duque de Osuna.
[257.]	Sorcery Scene,	From the Collection of the Duque de Osuna.
[258.]	Don Juan and the Comendador,	From the Collection of the Duque de Osuna.
[259.]	Don Quixote,
[260.]	St. Bernard of Siena,	Church of San Francisco el Grande.
[261.]	St. Bernard of Siena,	Marques de Torrecilla.
[262.]	Christ taken by the Soldiers,	Toledo Cathedral.
[263.]	Christ on the Cross,	Prado, Madrid.
[264.]	The Death of St. Joseph,	Don A. Beruete, Madrid.
[265.]	The Holy Family,	Prado, Madrid.
[266.]	St. Justa and St. Rufina,	Seville Cathedral.
[267.]	Apparition of St. Isidore to King Ferdinand III.,	Don A. Canovas, Madrid.
[268.]	St. Peter,	Don A. Pidal, Madrid.
[269.]	The Prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, The Rector of San Antonio.
[270.]	St. Elizabeth of Hungary healing Lepers,	Don Clemente Velasco.
[271.]	St. Hermenegild in Prison,	Don Clemente Velasco.
[272.]	Angels and Cherubim,	Conde de Villagonzalo.
[273.]	Fresco of the Cupola of San Antonio de la Florida,1st Section,	—The Church of San Antonio de la Florida.
[274.]	274. Fresco of the Cupola of San Antonio de la Florida, 2nd Section,
[275.]	275. Fresco of the Cupola of San Antonio de la Florida, 3rd Section,
[276.]	276. Fresco of the Cupola of San Antonio de la Florida, 4th Section,
[277.]	277. Group of Angels from San Antonio de la Florida,
[278.]	278. Fresco of San Antonio de la Florida,
[279.]	Lunch on the Banks of the Manzanares: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[280.]	Dance at San Antonio de la Florida: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[281.]	The Scuffle at the New Inn: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[282.]	Al Fresco Scene: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[283.]	The Drinker: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[284.]	The Parasol: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[285.]	The Kite: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[286.]	The Card-Players: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[287.]	Children with a Bladder: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[288.]	Boys picking Fruit: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[289.]	Blind Man playing the Guitar: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[290.]	The Fair of Madrid: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[291.]	The Crockery Seller: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[292.]	The Soldier and the Girl, La Acerolera: Tapestry Cartoons,	Prado, Madrid.
[293.]	Playing at Soldiers: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[294.]	The Game of Pelota: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[295.]	The Washerwomen: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[296.]	La Novillada: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[297.]	The Tobacco Guard: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[298.]	Children climbing a Tree, The Hunter and his Dogs, The Child and the Bird: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[299.]	The Woodcutters: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[300.]	The Rendezvous: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[301.]	The Gardener: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[302.]	The Vintagers: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[303.]	Poor Woman at the Fountain: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[304.]	Winter: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[305.]	The Wedding: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[306.]	Women at the Fountain: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[307.]	The Swing: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[308.]	The Stilt-Walkers: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[309.]	Boys climbing a Tree: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.
[310.]	Boy on a Sheep: Tapestry Cartoon,	Prado, Madrid.

CAPRICES.
PLATE		SUBJECT
[311.]	1.	Francisco Goya y Lucientes, Painter.
[312.]	2.	So it is settled.
[313.]	3.	Here comes the Bogey!
[314.]	4.	The Old Spoilt Child.
[315.]	5.	Birds of a Feather.
[316.]	6.	Appearances are Deceptive.
[317.]	7.	Not thus can he distinguish her.
[318.]	8.	Kidnapped.
[319.]	9.	Tantalus.
[320.]	10.	Love and Death.
[321.]	11.	Andalusian Brigands. Boys, to Work!
[322.]	12.	Tooth-hunting.
[323.]	13.	Scalding Hot!
[324.]	14.	What a Sacrifice!
[325.]	15.	Good Counsel.
[326.]	16.	‘May God pardon her!’
[327.]	17.	Bien tirada está.
[328.]	18.	‘And his House is burning!’
[329.]	19.	‘All will fall.’
[330.]	20.	They are already plucked.
[331.]	21.	How they pluck her.
[332.]	22.	Poor Little Things!
[333.]	23.	Carry this Dust away.
[334.]	24.	No Remedy.
[335.]	25.	Because he broke the Pitcher.
[336.]	26.	Now they have a Seat.
[337.]	27.	Which is the more bored?
[338.]	28.	Hush!
[339.]	29.	This is what he calls Reading.
[340.]	30.	Why hide them?
[341.]	31.	She prays for her.
[342.]	32.	For Over-sensibility.
[343.]	33.	‘To the Count Palatine.’
[344.]	34.	Sleep conquers them.
[345.]	35.	They shave him.
[346.]	36.	A Bad Night.
[347.]	37.	Will the Pupil know more than the Master?
[348.]	38.	Bravissimo!
[349.]	39.	As far as his Grandfather.
[350.]	40.	Of what Ill will he die?
[351.]	41.	Neither more nor less.
[352.]	42.	Thou who canst not.
[353.]	43.	The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters.
[354.]	44.	They spin Linen.
[355.]	45.	There is a lot to do.
[356.]	46.	Doing Penance.
[357.]	47.	Homage to the Master.
[358.]	48.	The Blowers.
[359.]	49.	Little Ghosts.
[360.]	50.	The Chinchillas.
[361.]	51.	They cut each others’ Nails.
[362.]	52.	What a Tailor can do.
[363.]	53.	‘What an Orator!’
[364.]	54.	The Shameful One.
[365.]	55.	Till Death.
[366.]	56.	Ascending and Descending.
[367.]	57.	The Pedigree.
[368.]	58.	Swallow that, you Dog!
[369.]	59.	And yet they do not go.
[370.]	60.	Trials.
[371.]	61.	Up above the World so high!
[372.]	62.	Who would believe it?
[373.]	63.	How grave they are!
[374.]	64.	Bon Voyage.
[375.]	65.	Where is Mamma going?
[376.]	66.	Changing Lodgings.
[377.]	67.	Wait till you have been anointed.
[378.]	68.	Pretty Mistress.
[379.]	69.	Fanning the Brazier.
[380.]	70.	Devout Professions.
[381.]	71.	The Day breaks, let us go.
[382.]	72.	You will not escape.
[383.]	73.	It is better to do nothing.
[384.]	74.	Don’t shout, Idiot.
[385.]	75.	Will no one set us free?
[386.]	76.	The Habit of Command.
[387.]	77.	A Mimic Bull-Fight.
[388.]	78.	Be quick, they waken.
[389.]	79.	No one has seen us.
[390.]	80.	Time’s Up!
DISASTERS OF WAR.
[391.]	1.	Sad Presentiments.
[392.]	2.	With or without Reason.
[393.]	3.	All the Same.
[394.]	4.	Women inspire Courage.
[395.]	5.	And are like Wild Beasts.
[396.]	6.	Well deserved!
[397.]	7.	Courage!
[398.]	8.	What always happens.
[399.]	9.	They will not!
[400.]	10.	Nor they.
[401.]	11.	Nor for these!
[402.]	12.	Were you born for this?
[403.]	13.	A Bitter Sight.
[404.]	14.	Hard is the Way.
[405.]	15.	And there was no Remedy.
[406.]	16.	They avail themselves.
[407.]	17.	An argument.
[408.]	18.	To bury and to be silent.
[409.]	19.	There is not Time.
[410.]	20.	To heal each other.
[411.]	21.	It will be the Same.
[412.]	22.	As much and more.
[413.]	23.	The same elsewhere.
[414.]	24.	They are still of use.
[415.]	25.	And these also.
[416.]	26.	That cannot be seen.
[417.]	27.	Charity.
[418.]	28.	The Populace.
[419.]	29.	He deserved it.
[420.]	30.	The Tragedy of War.
[421.]	31.	Strong Measures.
[422.]	32.	Why?
[423.]	33.	What more is there to do?
[424.]	34.	For a Knife.
[425.]	35.	No one knows why.
[426.]	36.	Nor wherefore.
[427.]	37.	This is worse.
[428.]	38.	Barbarians.
[429.]	39.	A Great Feat with the Dead.
[430.]	40.	He turns it to Account.
[431.]	41.	They escape through the Flames.
[432.]	42.	All is in Confusion.
[433.]	43.	Here also.
[434.]	44.	‘I saw it.’
[435.]	45.	And this, likewise.
[436.]	46.	This is bad.
[437.]	47.	Thus it happened.
[438.]	48.	Cruel Misfortune!
[439.]	49.	A Woman’s Charity.
[440.]	50.	Unhappy Mother.
[441.]	51.	Thanks to the Blue Millet.
[442.]	52.	They arrive too late.
[443.]	53.	He died without Help.
[444.]	54.	Vain Clamours.
[445.]	55.	To beg is worst of all.
[446.]	56.	To the Cemetery.
[447.]	57.	The Healthy and the Sick.
[448.]	58.	Of no Use to cry.
[449.]	59.	Of what Use is a Cup?
[450.]	60.	No one to help.
[451.]	61.	Are they of another Race?
[452.]	62.	Death-beds.
[453.]	63.	Collecting Dead.
[454.]	64.	Cartloads for the Cemetery.
[455.]	65.	‘What means this Tumult?’
[456.]	66.	Strange Devotion.
[457.]	67.	This is not less so.
[458.]	68.	What Folly!
[459.]	69.	Nothing; he says it himself.
[460.]	70.	They do not know the Way.
[461.]	71.	Against the General Good.
[462.]	72.	The Consequences.
[463.]	73.	The Cat’s Pantomime.
[464.]	74.	This is worse.
[465.]	75.	A Meeting of Quacks.
[466.]	76.	The Carnivorous Vulture.
[467.]	77.	May the Rope break.
[468.]	78.	He defends himself well.
[469.]	79.	Truly she died.
[470.]	80.	Should she revive!
TAUROMACHIA
PLATE		SUBJECT
[471.]	1.	Hunting Bulls across Country in the Olden Time.
[472.]	2.	Hunting the Bull on Foot.
[473.]	3.	Moors hunting the Bull across Country.
[474.]	4.	Moors fighting the Bull in an Enclosure.
[475.]	5.	The Moor Gazul fighting the Bull.
[476.]	6.	Moors irritating the Bull.
[477.]	7.	Origin of the Banderilla.
[478.]	8.	Moor attacked by a Bull.
[479.]	9.	Spaniard, wearing a Turban, slaying a Bull.
[480.]	10.	Charles V. spearing a Bull in the Arena of Valladolid.
[481.]	11.	The Cid spearing a Bull.
[482.]	12.	Mob attacking a Bull.
[483.]	13.	Horsemen planting Banderillas in the Bull.
[484.]	14.	The Student of Falces and the Bull.
[485.]	15.	The famous Martincho planting Banderillas.
[486.]	16.	Martincho’s Feat.
[487.]	17.	Moors using Donkeys as a rampart against Bulls.
[488.]	18.	Martincho in the Arena at Zaragoza.
[489.]	19.	Martincho’s Feat at Zaragoza.
[490.]	20.	Juanito Apiñani in the Arena at Madrid.
[491.]	21.	Spectators slain by the Bull at Madrid.
[492.]	22.	The Female Picador, Pajuelera, at Zaragoza.
[493.]	23.	Mariano Ceballos, alias el Indio, in the Arena.
[494.]	24.	Ceballos mounted on a Bull in the Arena at Madrid.
[495.]	25.	Bull-Baiting by Dogs.
[496.]	26.	Picador overthrown by the Bull.
[497.]	27.	Fernando del Toro in the Arena.
[498.]	28.	Rendon in the Arena at Madrid.
[499.]	29.	Pepe-Illo faces the Bull.
[500.]	30.	Pedro Romero in the Arena.
[501.]	31.	Flaming Banderillas.
[502.]	32.	Bull overthrowing Picador.
[503.]	33.	Death of Pepe-Illo in the Arena at Madrid.
[504.]	34.	Picadors mounted on Mules harnessed to a Carriage.
[505.]	35.	Bull carrying a Wounded Toreador on his Horns.
[506.]	36.	Bull carrying a Dead Toreador on his Horns.
[507.]	37.	Variation of No. 25. Bull-baiting.
[508.]	38.	A Spanish Gentleman in the Ring.
[509.]	39.	Bravo Toro!
[510.]	40.	Nearing the End.
PROVERBS
[511.]	1.	Women tossing a Dead Donkey and Mannikins in a Blanket.
[512.]	2.	Soldiers flying from a Tree draped to represent a Ghost.
[513.]	3.	Persons listening to an Orator.
[514.]	4.	Peasant dancing before a Man and Woman.
[515.]	5.	Man carrying off a Woman on a Winged Monster.
[516.]	6.	The Infuriated Man.
[517.]	7.	Man and Woman joined together at the Shoulders.
[518.]	8.	Persons dressed in Sacks.
[519.]	9.	Fantastic Personage offering Kittens to two Women.
[520.]	10.	Human Beings maltreated by a wild Horse.
[521.]	11.	A Two-headed Woman pursued by two Men.
[522.]	12.	Majos and Majas dancing.
[523.]	13.	Men attempting to fly.
[524.]	14.	Fantastic Salutations.
[525.]	15.	A Monk preaches; Soldier throws himself down an Abyss.
[526.]	16.	Man and Woman quarrelling.
[527.]	17.	Persons deriding a Blind Man.
[528.]	18.	The Old Man and the Corpse.

EXAMPLES IN THE COLLECTION OF SEÑOR A. DE BERUETE
PLATE	SUBJECT	GALLERY
[529.]	The Promenade,	Don A. de Beruete.
[530.]	A Pauper,	Don A. de Beruete.
[531.]	The Madman,	Don A. de Beruete.
[532.]	The Miser,	Don A. de Beruete.
[533.]	A Woman flying,	Don A. de Beruete.
[534.]	Madmen,	Don A. de Beruete.
[535.]	The Maja and the Cloaked Man,	Don A. de Beruete.
[536.]	A Monk suspended in the Air,	Don A. de Beruete.
[537.]	The Living Skeleton,	Don A. de Beruete.
[538.]	French Chastisement,	Don A. de Beruete.
[539.]	To have and to hold,	Don A. de Beruete.
[540.]	The Snake-Charmer,	Don A. de Beruete.
[541.]	Charity,	Don A. de Beruete.
[542.]	Who will win?	Don A. de Beruete.
[543.]	The Madman,	Don A. de Beruete.
[544.]	The Lady with the Puppies,	Don A. de Beruete.
[545.]	Paupers,	Don A. de Beruete.
[546.]	Procession entering the Temple,	Don A. de Beruete.
[547.]	Women praying,	Don A. de Beruete.
[548.]	Mid-Lent,	Don A. de Beruete.
[549.]	Brides of the Church,	Don A. de Beruete.
[550.]	Melodious Mediators,	Don A. de Beruete.
[551.]	A Sleeping Maja,	Don A. de Beruete.
[552.]	The Skaters,	Don A. de Beruete.
[553.]	Study for the Young Infante in ‘The Family of King Charles IV.,’	Don A. de Beruete.
[554.]	Study for the Portrait of the Queen in ‘The Family of King Charles IV.,’	Don A. de Beruete.
[555.]	Sleeping Giant,	Don A. de Beruete.
[556.]	A Gentle Episode,	Don A. de Beruete.
[557.]	A Prisoner,	Don A. de Beruete.
[558.]	The Happy Man,	Don A. de Beruete.
[559.]	Under a Hood,	Don A. de Beruete.
[560.]	Fairy Tales,	Don A. de Beruete.
[561.]	Spanish Beauty,	Don A. de Beruete.
[562.]	Haut-ton,	Don A. de Beruete.
[563.]	The Man with the Crocodile,	Don A. de Beruete.
[564.]	At last it breaks,	Don A. de Beruete.
[565.]	The Broken Pitcher,	Don A. de Beruete.
[566.]	Woman with a Child in Arms,	Don A. de Beruete.
[567.]	Rural Events,	Don A. de Beruete.
[568.]	Chastisement,	Don A. de Beruete.
[569.]	A Monk doing Penance,	Don A. de Beruete.
[570.]	The Invalid,	Don A. de Beruete.
[571.]	Mirar lo que no ven,	Don A. de Beruete.
[572.]	An Idiot,	Don A. de Beruete.
[573.]	Invocation,	Don A. de Beruete.
[574.]	Prayer,	Don A. de Beruete.
[575.]	A Mad Newswoman,	Don A. de Beruete.
[576.]	A Monk,	Don A. de Beruete.
[577.]	The Bride,	Don A. de Beruete.
[578.]	The Belle of the Assembly,	Don A. de Beruete.
[579.]	One more Unfortunate,	Don A. de Beruete.
[580.]	A Portrait,	Don A. de Beruete.
FRESCOES IN THE CHURCH OF SAN ANTONIO DE LA FLORIDA
[581.]	Interior of the Church of San Antonio de la Florida,
[582.]	San Antonio de la Florida,	Painting in the Principal Chapel.
[583.]	San Antonio de la Florida,	Paintings on the Centres of the Intrados of the Choir and Principal Chapel Arches.
[584], [585.]	San Antonio de la Florida,	Paintings on the Springings of the Intrados of the Principal Chapel Arches.
[586], [587.]	San Antonio de la Florida,	Paintings on the Springings of the Intrados of the Choir Arches.
[588.]	San Antonio de la Florida,	Paintings on the Intrados of the left Side Chapel Arch.
[589.]	San Antonio de la Florida,	Paintings on the Intrados of the right Side Chapel Arch.
[590.]	San Antonio de la Florida,	Triangles formed by the Dome adjoining the Principal Chapel.
[591.]	San Antonio de la Florida,	Triangles formed by the Dome adjoining the Choir.
[592], [593.]	San Antonio de la Florida,	Paintings at the Sides of the Window on the left.
[594], [595.]	San Antonio de la Florida,	Paintings at the Sides of the Window on the right.
[596.]	San Antonio de la Florida,	First Group on the Cupola to the left of the Centre.
[597.]	San Antonio de la Florida,	Second Group on the Cupola to the left of the Centre.
[598.]	San Antonio de la Florida,	Centre of the Composition on the Cupola facing the Entrance.
[599.]	San Antonio de la Florida,	First Group on the Cupola to the right of the Centre.
[600.]	San Antonio de la Florida,	Second Group on the Cupola to the right of the Centre.
DRAWINGS, ETC.
[601.]	The Duke of Wellington, 1812,	From the Original Drawing in the Print Room of the British Museum.
[602.]	Lady and Gentleman on Horseback.	From the Original Drawing in the Print Room of the British Museum.
[603.]	Head of the Dying Fray Juan	From the Original Drawing Fernanez. in the Print Room of the British Museum.
[604.]	A Criminal undergoing the infliction	From the Original Drawing of the Garotte. in the Print Room of the British Museum.
[605.]	A Lost Soul,	From the Original Drawing in the Print Room of the British Museum.
[606.]	Condemned Criminals conducted to	From the Original Drawing Execution. in the Print Room of the British Museum.
[607.]	Spanish Proverb Illustrated,	From an Etching, hitherto unpublished, in the Print Room of the British Museum.
[608.]	Spanish Proverb Illustrated,	From an Etching, hitherto unpublished, in the Print Room of the British Museum.
[609.]	Spanish Proverb Illustrated,	From an Etching, hitherto unpublished, in the British Museum.
[610.]	The Bulls: A Study of the Animals in various positions.	From an Etiching, hitherto unpublished, in the British Museum.
[611.]	Bull-fighter fettered in the Arena,	From an Etching, hitherto unpublished, in the British Museum.
[612.]	A Blind Guitar-Player tossed by a Bull.	From an Etching in the Print Room of the British Museum.

GOYA

I

A century before the birth of Goya, Spanish painting had attained its crown of achievement in the work of the four great naturalists, Velazquez, Ribera, Zurbarán, and Murillo. Josef de Ribera (‘Lo Spagnoletto’), had succeeded Ribalta, and had given lasting expression to the realism which characterised Spanish art in the seventeenth century; Francisco de Zurbarán, the Estremaduran peasant, whom Lord Leighton called ‘All Spain,’ carried on the tradition of the elder Herrera in his passion for truth in detail and in the dramatic intensity of his expression; Murillo, the disciple of the Spanish Catholic Church, bewitched his generation with what Antonio Castillo y Saavedra described as his ‘wondrous grace and beauty of colouring’; and Velazquez, ‘our Velazquez,’ as Palomino proudly styled him, was the supreme painter through whom Spanish art became the light of a new artistic life.

Of Velazquez it has been said that he attained perfection in the realism of detail and in the realism of sight, and in his commanding genius Spanish art was emancipated from the fetters of pseudo-Italianism in which it had laboured so long. He carried Spanish realism to its Ultima Thule. Further his age could not go, and generations of artists who came after him devoted themselves to the imitation and reproduction of his colour and his technique with such passionate servility that in the end the copy of the pupil was frequently mistaken for the work of the master. The perfect technique of the great Court painter had, in his own day, the effect of arresting artistic development—it left his successors nothing to solve for themselves. He achieved so much in his own work that, for a time, the last word in art seemed to have been spoken. Until his influence had died away, the reproduction of Velazquez was the aim of the Madrid painters. For this reason, after the death of Velazquez, the artistic life of the seventeenth century became a spent force, and for want of new impetus of original genius, Spanish art steadily declined. The followers of the supreme painter failed to realise the true inwardness of his message. They had the seed, but they could raise no new flower. One feels towards the pictures of Velazquez as Swinburne felt towards the muse of Sappho:

’ ... earth’s womb has borne in vain
New things, and never this best thing again;
Borne days and men, borne fruits and wars and wine,
Seasons and songs but no song more like mine.’

But the reverent desire to perpetuate ‘this best thing’ could not arrest the decay of artistic inspiration. The disciples of Velazquez copied and painted successfully (up to a point), and they trained other generations of imitators who continued to work and teach their methods, until imitation slowly but surely sank into artistic degradation. Under the sway of Mariana of Austria, the decay of Spanish painting was further hastened, and the ascendency of the facile, brilliant brush of Luca Giordano, under Charles II., dealt the death-blow to the realistic impulse that had carried the national school of the middle seventeenth century to the realisation of its utmost ambition.

The decadence which followed the death of Velazquez was most pronounced among the Castilian painters, but the empire of Giordano extended to the Provincial schools and completed the more gradual decline of art in Andalusia and Valencia. Seville was foredoomed to decadence as a school of painting, for its artists had taken Murillo as their model, and in servilely imitating the ‘Painter of the Conceptions,’ they emphasised his faults, exaggerated his unreality, and caricatured his affectations. The popular admiration of Murillo was all-powerful to hasten the general decline, and each year the artistic outgrowth of Andalusia became more enfeebled.

In the last months of the seventeenth century Charles II. died without issue and the art-loving Austrian dynasty was ended. The succeeding Bourbon sovereigns brought with them an art derived from France; they had no ambition to reanimate the native art of the country. Madrid became the only recognised art centre in Spain, and to Madrid, in 1761, came, at the invitation of Charles III., Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, the Venetian fresco-painter, and the Saxon pedant, Anton Raphael Mengs. The Spanish painters who had rendered homage to the facile Giordano were caught by the glamour of the fantastic, insincere art of Tiepolo, while the dreary academic influence of Mengs—whose paintings are declared by Carl Justi to echo the last shadow of eclectic mannerism—made for all that is dull, exact, and lifeless in pictorial art. No great Spaniard arose to counteract the demoralising influence of these imported professors; it was realised in the studios of Madrid that the methods of the favoured aliens led to popularity and fortune; the Spanish artists followed the line of least resistance, nor desisted when they found that it carried them ever further from the tradition founded by Velazquez.

This art, dull but without dignity, showy but meaningless, was the reflex of the prevailing rottenness in the national life. During the reign of Charles III. a certain superficial decency was observed; the corruptness of Court life was kept out of sight; a general conspiracy of make-believe was maintained. But under Maria Luisa of Parma and Charles IV., the abomination of moral desolation in social, political and artistic life was complete and confessed. Manuel Godoy, afterwards Prince de la Paz, was Prime Minister of Spain, and the country was demoralised by dissolute courtiers and unscrupulous ministers, and drained by insatiable priests. But in the turmoil created by an aristocracy sunk in lasciviousness, a government steeped in corruption, and a commonalty beaten and bled into a state of nerveless resignation, was heard the echo of the revolutionary movement which was sweeping over Europe. The teaching of Goethe and Schiller, followed by the preaching of Rousseau, had taken concrete form in the butcheries of Robespierre and Danton; the movement had culminated in the personal supremacy of Napoleon Buonaparte.

The hopes of the Spanish nation were centred in the Crown Prince Ferdinand. Even as the First of the Tigers thought to exterminate Fear by killing a man, the Spaniards believed that the abdication of Charles IV. would make an end of misrule and give their country peace and prosperity. But the King hated his son, and inspired by the double purpose of defeating the ambition of the Crown Prince and punishing the disloyalty of his subjects, he laid his crown at the feet of the Emperor of the French, who bestowed it upon his brother, Joseph Buonaparte. The Spanish liberals made the alien king welcome, but the Spanish loyalists proved a constant thorn in the side of the usurper, and at the end of five years Joseph Buonaparte fled Madrid. Two years later the Prince of the Asturias returned to Spain to be crowned king as Ferdinand VII. Again the distressful country was plunged into the depths of retrogression, clericalism, and fanaticism. Spain was undergoing her fate.

The strong men of the troublous times of the eighteenth century were the revolutionaries and reformers, and, as was inevitable, they sprang from the people. Rousseau, Robespierre, Napoleon, these were the forces that directed the movement, the effect of which was to make itself felt from one end of Europe to the other. Goya was a revolutionary. He lived under four kings of Spain. He was elected a member of the Académia de San Fernando in the reign of Charles III.; Charles IV. appointed him Pintor de Cámara del Rey; he took the oath of allegiance to Joseph Buonaparte and painted the usurper’s portrait; Ferdinand VII., who declared that he had deserved death for his defection from the Bourbon cause, condemned the man but pardoned the artist and received him as a member of the new Court. Critical opinion condones Goya’s flexible patriotism by the fact that ‘it was a period of national disaster,’ and that ‘national calamity was not altered by these trivialities.’

Goya, we are reminded, was a revolutionary; he was also a pitiless, if quizzical, onlooker at the life of the Madrid Court. It was a simple matter to him to transfer his allegiance from the Bourbons to Joseph Buonaparte, and it was even more simple to welcome Ferdinand VII. to the throne. ‘What did such changes matter in years of irretrievable ruin?’ writes C. Gasquoine Hartley, in A Record of Spanish Painting. The question may be left for the individual to answer according to his own fancy. And if Goya was, as some will find, an opportunist, a political weathercock, and a moral Vicar of Bray, as an artist he was a great reformative force. Alternately an idealist and a realist, he fought with all the social forces and against the academic standards of the school commanded by David and Mengs, destroying the debased conventions of painting and freeing the brush from the domination of a clique. A national artist par excellence, he gave lasting form to the sentiments, customs and conditions of his country. A profound believer in empiricism, a great humourist, sometimes impetuous and fantastic, at other times holding fast to reality; a master of portraiture; fantastic, inspired, spontaneous in his aquafortis etchings; he seized upon and immortalised every aspect of the gruesome tragi-comedy which was played in Spain in the last years of the eighteenth century.

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was born at the end of March (the 30th or 31st) 1746 at Fuentetodos near Zaragoza, in Aragon, the province which gave to the nation poets like the ‘Spanish Horaces,’ historians like Zurita, teachers like Gracián and Luzán, a scholar like Latassa, and a statesman like the Conde de Aranda. Goya was baptized in the Church of Our Lady of the Ascent, and the names given him by his godmother, Francesca de Grasa, were Francis Joseph. The amiable weakness for connecting great men with great families has prompted a German biographer to claim that both his father and mother belonged to the nobility, and that his first patron was the Duque de Fuentes. Less imaginative authorities, however, tell us that his parents, José Goya and Gracia Lucientes, were poor but hardworking peasants, and that when ‘the regenerator of the Spanish school of naturalistic painters’—to quote the prefatory note to Goya’s pictures in the Prado catalogue—had completed his course of elementary instruction at the hands of the village schoolmaster, he was put to agriculture. A fortunate accident revealed the bent of the lad’s genius and liberated him, at the age of fourteen, from the drudgery of manual labour.

M. Matheron relates that the lad had been sent with a sack of wheat to a neighbouring mill, when a monk of Zaragoza (probably Father Felix Salvador of the Carthusian convent of Aula Dei) happened upon him. Goya, seated on his burden, was intent upon drawing a pig with a piece of charcoal upon a whitewashed wall. The priest, struck by the correct free lines traced by the youngster, inquired who his master was and received the characteristic reply: ‘I have none, your reverence. It is not my fault, I cannot keep from drawing.’ The overmastering incentive pleaded by the youthful delinquent never forsook him, and, although powerful enemies resented his too free use of the pencil, and the Holy Inquisition was moved to curb his unwearied industry, he continued to ply brush and needle and gavel during sixty-eight years of changing, strenuous life. Father Salvador remained Goya’s friend until his death. He saw his father, and obtained permission from him, in 1760, for the lad to go to Zaragoza. The imperial city exercised a powerful influence upon his art. There is always in his pictures, as one of his countrymen points out, the Zaragoza landscape, so rich in the contrasts of its splendid and vigorous vegetation, recalling the banks of the Genil or the Turia, while its limy hills and grey plains bring to the memory the vistas of Castile. The melancholy of the sky—pierced by the severe lines of innumerable towers and bounded by the austere distant rock—remind us that here the sun has not the same suggested warmth that supplied the rays for Murillo’s brush; that this is not the land of fancy but the land of genius, cold as the snow of the Moncayo, that adds beauty to the beautiful plants which produce not sweet odours but healing balsams.

Thanks to the friendly offices of Father Salvador, Goya was admitted to the studio of José Luzán y Martinez, whose religious and historical pictures bear evidence of soft fresh colouring. He attended, too, the school founded in 1714 by the sculptor Juan Ramirez, a pupil of the well-intentioned Gregoria de Mesa. In the studio of Martinez, Goya, who from the first betrayed his lifelong passion for realism, worked with untiring ardour, stimulated, it may be, by the industry of his co-pupils, José Beratón, Tómas Vallespin, and the Huesca jeweller, Antonio Martinez, who founded, in Madrid, the silversmith’s business which still bears his name. ‘In the schools of Zaragoza,’ says C. Gasquoine Hartley, ‘he followed no conventional standards, and his continuous study was directed to the development of his exuberant individuality. To comprehend the truth, and afterwards to depict it, as it pleased his ever-varying fancy, this was his great aim. His utterance was inevitable and instinctive, the overflow of his dramatic, inexhaustible and vivid imagination.’

Goya’s exuberant, passionate temperament betrayed itself in other directions outside his art. He lived, as he worked, in a condition of unconventional, even arrogant independence. Many tales of the wild escapades of his youth are told. His revolutionary tendencies embroiled him in frequent altercations; thrice he is said to have fallen under the ban of the Inquisition. Zaragoza finally grew unsafe for him, and in 1766 he fled to Madrid. There are no discovered documents relating to his first years in Madrid, and his biographers, for the most part, preserve a discreet reticence concerning his mode of life in the capital. It is supposed that he copied Velazquez, and the pictures at the Casa de Campo, the seat of the Duque de Arcos. It has even been surmised that, through his friendship with Bayeu, he had the entrée to the royal palaces of La Zarzuela, Aranjuez, and the Escorial. Other writers favour the idea that he lived the life of a young revolutionary, and Richard Muther, in his monograph of the painter, pictures him ‘wild and passionate, an athlete in his physical strength,’ being ‘everywhere present when dancing or love-making, scuffling or stabbing, is going forward.’ The one outstanding fact, upon which most biographers are agreed, is that one morning he was found lying in the streets with a dagger in his back. This occurrence, supplemented, it is said, by his misfortune in again incurring the displeasure of the Inquisition—some hold that he was placed under police supervision—made him once more seek safety in flight. He had a will to visit Rome, but no money to defray his travelling expenses. Tradition declares that he joined himself to a company of bull-fighters, worked his way to the coast as a picador, and set sail for Italy.

Iriarte is the authority for most of the details concerning this period of Goya’s career. French writers declare that the painter remained in Italy from 1769 to 1774. There is a full-length likeness of Pope Benedict XIV. still in the Vatican which is said to have been painted by Goya in a few hours, but as that pontiff died in 1756 there is much reason to doubt the truth of the legend.

The Conde de la Viñaza in his Life of Goya refutes every detail of this story. It is said that while Goya was in Italy he secured a prize offered by the Parma Academy of Fine Arts for a picture of ‘Hannibal surveying Rome from a pinnacle of the Alps,’ but the Conde maintains that Goya at this time was in Spain and that it was in his own country he painted his picture and carried off the second prize. In the Mercure de France of January 1772 we read: ‘Le 27 Juin dernier l’Académie Royale des Beaux Arts de Parme tint sa séance publique pour la distribution de ses prix. Le sujet de peinture était: “Annibal vainqueur du haut des Alpes jette ses premiers regards sur les campagnes d’Italie.”... Le premier prix de peinture a été accordé au tableau qui avait devise: “Montes fregit aceto,” et qui était de monsieur Paul Borroni etc. Le second prix de peinture a été remporté par M. François Goya romain (sic), élève de M. Vajeu, peintre du roi d’Espagne.’

The following paragraph by M. Paul Mantz from the same source is quoted into the Archives de l’art français: ‘L’Académie a remarqué avec plaisir dans le second tableau un beau maniement de pinceau, de la chaleur d’expression dans le regard d’Annibal et un caractère de grandeur dans l’attitude de ce général. Si M. Goya se fût moins écarté dans sa composition du sujet du programme, et s’il eût mis plus de vérité dans son coloris, il aurait balancé les suffrages pour le premier prix.’

The Conde de la Viñaza, Goya’s Spanish biographer, maintains that this picture was painted and the prize won before the artist went to Italy, and he proves, by the publication of documents preserved in the Archives of the Pilar Cathedral at Zaragoza, that in October 1771 the painter, forsaking Madrid, was back on the banks of the Ebro in the enjoyment of an enviable reputation. This is in direct contradiction to the old stories describing a love adventure as the reason for his sudden and hasty departure from Rome. A mad enterprise which had for its object the rescue of a young maid from a convent ended, it is said, in his capture, and he ‘only escaped the gallows by the most reckless and headlong flight.’ This much we know, that Goya was in Zaragoza in 1771. He returned not as a fugitive and an outlaw, but as a reputable citizen having the confidence of the Cathedral authorities, who commissioned him to paint the quadrangular vault in the Holy Chapel. The fresco which he prepared as a proof that ‘he was experienced in this kind of painting,’ was submitted to the Building Committee of the Cathedral, on November 11, 1771, together with the director’s assurance that it had received the approval of experts, and with Goya’s offer to paint the vault of the small choir for 15,000 reals, he providing the labourers and materials. The Committee, having heard this proposition and recognising it as better than that made by Don Antonio Velazquez, who asked 25,000 reals for the work, ‘agreed to Goya’s proposition, but in order to be safe and sure,’ it was stipulated that he should make some further studies and submit them to Madrid for the approval of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (San Fernando), ‘which obtained, the negotiations would be completed and the contract signed.’

On January 27, 1772, Goya presented his study to the Committee, who having ‘already been informed that it was a skilful piece of work in specially good style,’ approved it, and waiving the stipulation that it should be submitted to the Royal Academy, they decided that the artist should forthwith proceed with the work. The documents give no information concerning the progress of the work, but we learn from a minute in the Building Committee’s meeting, held on June 1, 1772, that the painting of the choir was nearly finished by that date, and the scaffolding was about to be taken down.

We are without any authentic particulars concerning the next three years of Goya’s life, but the Conde de la Viñaza supposes that with the 15,000 reals which this work brought him, he went to Italy. How he passed his time there cannot be definitely stated, but many interesting surmises have obtained currency. We are assured by Mr. Muther that for Goya ‘the antique had no more existence than the magnificent art of the cinque-cento: what attracted him was rather the teeming life of the people. Out of the red robes of the priests, the costumes, gay with colour, of the women of Trastevere, the merry, careless freedom of the Lazzaroni, he created fragments of life, rich with all its varied colour. Muleteers with their jangling cars, religious processions and Carnivale masques,’ to say nothing of much ‘love-making, scuffling and stabbing’—these are imagined to be the influences that directed his genius during his stay in Italy. Paul Lafond (Goya), while admitting the legendary element in most of the reported incidents in the life of the painter, repeats the stories of his ascending to the lantern in the dome of St. Peter’s, of his making a tour of Cecilia Melella’s tomb, walking upright on the narrow ledge of the cornice, of his amatory escapade at a convent and its resultant flight from Rome. He also adds that his genre pictures attracted so much attention in Rome that the Russian ambassador, instructed by his sovereign to invite a number of distinguished artists to establish themselves at the Court at St. Petersburg, made Goya a very tempting offer, which he refused. On the other hand, the Conde de la Viñaza declares that ‘he was frequently seen studying the most sublime frescoes in the land, leaning boldly on the decorations of the architraves or on the most dangerous parts of the cornices’; that he secured the necessaries of life by the sale of pictures of the customs of his native land; that he made the acquaintance of Luis David, for whom he formed a deep and lasting attachment; and, finally, that ‘the only recollection he preserved of Italy in his old age was of his having met there the painter of “The Rape of the Sabines.”’

The friendship that existed between Goya and David has called attention to the similarities in the temperament and the aims of the two men, whose work was so widely different. Both used their brushes to glorify the throne and received honours from kings; both sacrificed tradition on the altar of new ideas; and both lacked the tenderness and the faith necessary in the treatment of religious subjects. David was the friend of Robespierre and Saint Just, of Marat and Buonaparte; he painted the ‘Coronation of the Hero of the Pyramids’; he attended the Convention and voted for the death of Louis XVI. Goya was the friend of Godoy and of the ministers of Joseph Buonaparte; he painted the pictures of the Usurper as well as those of the kings that preceded and followed him; and he executed ‘The Disasters of War’ and ‘The Caprices.’ David was ambitious for the aggrandisement of his art, and Goya strove to make it worthy of its civilising mission, but they differed in the means by which they sought to attain their respective ends. David was inspired by the antique, and produced works which possessed the hardness of statuary as well as its clear-cut accuracy of form, while Goya went direct to nature for his inspiration, and his paintings are the reflections of naked reality. The painter of ‘The Death of Socrates’ was imbued with the guiding purpose of making his work dignified, elaborately accurate, and exclusive, while the author of the frescoes of La Florida, drawing inspiration from the customs of the toilers and the dandies alike, held that ‘a picture is finished when its effect is true.’ David represented man endowed with improbable and unattractive virtues, Goya painted man as he was; David idealised the individual form with classic grandeur, and his austere and solemn compositions, though based on observation of nature, were moulded to a fixed external idea; but Goya was as faithful to psychologic truth as to anatomy, and his brush revealed the moral sentiments of mankind and laid bare the passionate and terrible emotions of the human soul.

When Goya returned to Madrid in 1775 Spanish art was directed by Mengs and Tiepolo, by Maëlla and Francesco Bayeu. Mengs, the ‘reasoning artificer,’ who had neglected the world of nature in his servile study of Raphael and the antique, was a painter who theorised much and invented little. According to Richard Cumberland he was an artist incapable of portraying either life or death; a painter whose creations neither terrify nor inspire passion or transport; a timid, conscientious craftsman with an excellent hand for miniature. Yet Mengs, the ‘Spanish David,’ as we are told by José de Madrazo, was regarded by the youth of his time as ‘the regenerator of the antique,’ and from the dictatorial chair of pictorial art, his voice ‘was heard like that of an oracle, not so much by the artistic cohorts of agitated Germany, where he received little attention, as by the peaceful Italo-Spanish pleiades, who applauded with enthusiasm the exhumation of the Hellenic form from among the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii, because it was the fashion, and without comprehending the reach of that fortuitous event.’

In the fantastic, beautiful, but slightly handled compositions of Battista Tiepolo we have the reaction against this form of classicism. The Venetian possessed a fertile and brilliant fancy, his execution was free and daring, if at times careless, and, in addition, he had a wide knowledge of the resources of his art. His decorations in the new palace at Madrid were ‘extolled to the skies of a generation that had forgotten Velazquez.’ Tiepolo got his effects rapidly; Mengs was laborious to a fault, but his work was probably a better guide for second-rate painters, themselves poorly equipped in knowledge, than the clearly (though incorrectly) drawn compositions of his Venetian contemporary. As director of the Académia de San Fernando, Mengs suggested several new laws for the government of the students and certain alterations in the methods of study. These were at first adopted, but in carrying them into effect the director seems to have met with opposition and involved himself in quarrels, which ‘did little credit to the wisdom of his fellow-directors, or to his own temper and tact.’ As a result of these dissensions Mengs failed to accomplish all his reforms, but he secured several important changes in the Academy. It was due to his efforts that plaster casts were taken of the statues discovered at Herculaneum. Charles III. dowered the institution with a rich collection of marbles and bronzes which had been presented to his Majesty by Mengs, and he supplemented this gift with a large number of statues and busts from the Museum of Cristina of Sweden, and with pictures from the royal galleries and from the suppressed houses of the Jesuits. The sovereign also formed a library for the Academy, opened a school of perspective (Royal Decree of August 19, 1766), and commissioned the surgeon Augustin Navarro to instruct the students in the science of nature and the human form.

In his efforts on behalf of the Academy, Mengs had the loyal assistance of Francisco Bayeu and Mariano Maëlla. The latter’s pictures are deficient in invention, in vigour of execution, and in variety; indeed his cold pearl-coloured creations have nothing to compensate their feeble and unimpressive handling and colour. Bayeu was gifted with peculiar intelligence and as an artist displayed fertility, capacity in composing a picture, and a skilful touch, but his designs lack vigour and delicacy, and his colour is disagreeable.

When Goya reappeared in Madrid in 1775, Mengs was dictator of art, and Bayeu was the Court painter. Goya’s art owed nothing to contemporary influence or example, but to these two officials he was indebted for employment and for his wife. The young Aragonese knew nothing of the bitterness of long apprenticeship; his rise in the esteem of the art world of Madrid was rapid. This, in a measure, was due to his genius, but his worldly prospects were assisted by his marriage to Josefa Bayeu, the sister of the Court painter, and by the influence of Mengs, which secured for him a commission to execute a series of designs for the tapestries woven at the Fábrica de Tapices de Santa Bárbara. This first series were designed for the decoration of the dining-room and bed-chamber of the Prince of the Asturias in the Palace of El Pardo. Goya delivered the first picture on October 31, 1776; on January 26, 1778, the tenth and last cartoon was delivered.

Between 1776 and 1791 Goya executed the forty-six tapestry cartoons which now hang in the Prado, and he repainted many of his designs on a smaller scale for the Countess of Benavente at the Alameda. As late as 1802 the Santa Bárbara factory wove tapestries from Goya’s pictures, and up to 1832 some of the more favoured designs had been reproduced four times. Isabella II. presented some of these fabrics to King Leopold of Belgium, but the greater number adorn the royal palaces of Madrid, El Pardo, and the Escorial.

The designs for tapestries which Goya composed during this period of over twenty-five years form a large part of the painter’s artistic output. It has been said that these early designs do not exhibit any of the painter’s predominant characteristics, and that they reveal crudeness and uncertainty. It is probable that Goya approached the task, in the first place, with very little knowledge of either the industry or the style of design required from him. Mr. Rothenstein remarks that the models in the Prado are painted ‘in so crude a key, and with so little regard for harmony of colouring, that their merit is apt to escape the attention of many students,’ while the strong reds and yellows Goya employs in them have prompted Mr. Muther to compare them unfavourably with the ‘tender delicate colouring’ of Watteau and Lancret. Certainly Goya’s designs are unequal in merit. It must be remembered, too, that often he had not the good fortune of being reproduced faithfully; while other artists employed by the factory gained much by reproduction, his work almost invariably suffered in the process. The officials at the factory objected to the elaborate and delicate work which Goya submitted, and a beautiful model (‘The Blind Man playing the Guitar’) was returned to him on the ground that it could not be successfully transferred to the threads of the warp. Goya corrected his design by exaggerating all the tints and he accentuated the figures by enclosing them in white outlines. This fact suggests one reason why Goya’s enthusiasm in the employment speedily grew cool.

We learn from the Palace archives that the officials, who were more concerned with the commercial than the artistic side of the manufacture, declared that Goya’s figures were ‘dandies and girls with so much decoration of coifs, ribbons, fal-lals, gauzes, etc., that much time and patience is wasted on them, and the work is unproductive.’ They contrived to remedy this defect by covering his figures with paintings of trees or clouds or anything else that made the tapestry easier and cheaper to produce, and this treatment was not calculated to make Goya more careful in the finish of his designs. It therefore follows of necessity that only occasionally among his later cartoons can one be found to compare with those in the first series, such, for instance, as ‘The Picnic on the Banks of the Manzanares’ and ‘The Dance at San Antonio de la Florida,’ or indeed with any of the earlier designs, which were all remarkable for the vigour and animation of the scenes, the delicacy of colouring (despite an occasional surfeit of sienna and red ochre), the strength and freedom of the drawing, and the genius for natural and effective grouping in the composition of the pictures. Goya would appear in these works to be carried away by his imagination, and he has presented to us a masterly panorama of all that is brightest and most joyous in the national customs—a panorama that pulsates with life, bubbles over with spontaneous merriment, and fascinates with its irresistible gaiety. We seem to hear the bells of the pony chaise and the pleasant jokes of the wenches at the fêtes on the banks of the Manzanares; the farces of Ramón de la Cruz are translated into the language of colour. And the pictures with children—happy, roguish youngsters—reveal not only marvellous skill, but a sympathy with the poetry and charm of childhood that has not been surpassed. Zapater tells us that Goya was often seen surrounded by children in his house by the Manzanares, and his whole-hearted love of childish grace and innocence is manifested in these studies.

Among his later work as a designer of tapestry one of the best examples is ‘The Earthenware Stall,’ which in its delicacy of colouring, its skilful arrangement of transparent draperies, and its brilliant lighting, is comparable with ‘The Village Wedding,’ which Cruzada declares to be the most graceful composition of the whole collection. Here the story is told with supreme humour. The stupid and happy youth in his finest attire walks beside his fresh-coloured bride who is bedecked with finery and ribbons, a priest and the parents and friends of the young couple accompany them, and the village piper marches in front surrounded by a crowd of singing, shouting, dancing children. In beauty of colouring this design is the equal of the handsome, graceful figures in ‘The Water-Girls,’ and in its mirthfulness and realism it is a companion to his illustration of ‘Blind Man’s Buff,’ which overflows with irrepressible merriment. Another notable design which is also the largest that Goya painted, is ‘El Agosto,’ a striking piece of work. ‘On contemplating this picture,’ writes the Conde de la Viñaza—who declares that it entitles Goya to be known as the Theocritus, the Virgil, and the Garcilaso of painting—‘the sun seems to burn and asphyxiate with its fire, the reapers appear to be dazed with wine, and we seem to hear the chirping of a cricket hidden in the sheaves. Of the children crying and playing on the hills of straw, some appear to be the children of Van Dyck, and others the work of the expressive hand that created the weeping Ganymede.’

The forty-six cartoons mentioned in the Prado catalogue—of which thirty-three are reproduced at the end of this volume—are now contained in the Goya Room of the Madrid Gallery. During the reign of Isabella II., Frederico de Madrazo, the director of the Royal Gallery, repeatedly importuned the administrators of the Royal Patrimony to exhume the Goya designs from the cellars of the Tapestry offices to which they had been consigned, and to have them restored and housed in the Royal Museum. This request, however, was not conceded, and it remained for Gregorio Cruzada Villaamil to rescue them from the oblivion into which they had fallen. He succeeded in having the cartoons placed at the disposal of the Escorial Tapestry Museum Commission, and after being restored they were sent to the Prado. Unfortunately the works are difficult to restore and quickly deteriorate; for it was Goya’s practice to sketch his pictures with extraordinary rapidity, to surround the whole with carbon, and then trace his figures with the aid of aqua rás. Many of the studies in the Prado are covered with glass in order to preserve from total loss the canvases on which scarcely any oil has been used beyond that contained in the colours.

During these first years of his material prosperity Goya varied his work for the tapestry factory by producing genre paintings and a few portraits. He also began at this time to exercise his extraordinary powers as an engraver. As an exponent of genre he was unsurpassed, as a portraitist he was excelled by Velazquez alone, but his genius is more certainly demonstrated in his aquafortis work than in either his genre studies, his frescoes, or his portraits. ‘Goya was pre-eminently fitted, both by his environment and by his nature,’ writes C. Gasquoine Hartley, ‘to be the exponent of genre.’ The truth of this dictum is patent to all who study his canvases of this period. The customs that he depicted were the customs that he loved; the subjects, the people, and the passions represented are always real. He reveals both imagination and invention in the grouping and arrangement of the scenes. The vigour and boldness of his manner is revealed in the success with which he seizes, as with a camera, the fleeting movement—the unfinished smile, the arrested gesture—and seals it upon his canvas. His scenes of carnival and of merry-makings, his representations of bull-fights, and his sidelights on the Inquisition, are living phases of the life which surrounded him and in which he found his pleasure and his inspiration. The spirit of Goya is in all these pictures. His dramatic temperament, his fierce humour, and his imagination found their outlet in the life of the period and expressed itself in these paintings in which that life is immortalised.

In all that he painted Goya never lost sight of, if he did not always attain, his object of securing absolute truth of effect. Whether he is employed on a portrait, a representation of romance or diablerie, or a religious fresco, he is true to the principle explained in his own remark that ‘a picture is finished when its effect is true.’ And the truth of ‘his flashes of insight imprisoned in line and paint,’ give his work a sense of modernity which is seen in the pictures of few other artists. M. Paul Lefond declares: ‘More than any other painter of past periods he is made to be understood in our day. Something more and something better than a modern, the Aragon painter still remains a forerunner; he is still almost a contemporary of the generation to come. His manner of translating and interpreting nature is absolutely modern. He renders it as he sees it, with the comprehension of an artist of our time, daring and independent. He is more than a hundred years in advance of his century. His manner of portrait-painting is completely outside all theory of teaching; his fashion of treating frescoes is an extraordinary audacity. He has in his whole existence, without truce or compromise, been pursued by this idea of arriving at the true expression of life.’

It has been claimed for Goya that his genius was arrogantly unsubjective; that he had no master and was contemptuous of all rules. Originality and independence could go no further, and it may be admitted that he was intolerant of outside influence. But the spark of genius must be fanned into flame by the magnetic influence of example, and while Goya studied nature with a passionate and jealous devotion, he glories in the debt he owes to Rembrandt and Velazquez. ‘I have had three masters,’ he wrote to a literary friend, ‘Nature, Velazquez, and Rembrandt.’ Some have tried to recognise in him a disciple of Tiepolo, and his study of the aquafortis engravings of the Venetian may well have suggested his adoption of that so long neglected method of engraving, but as we should expect, he preserved an independent attitude of mind and developed a manner quite different from that of Tiepolo. There is no evidence, in his engravings, of any admiration for Tiepolo’s style, but his admiration of Rembrandt was as sincere as was his devotion to Velazquez. Gautier finds that Goya’s work reminds one of Velazquez and Rembrandt, ‘as a son reminds you of his ancestors, without any servile imitation—or rather, more by certain congeniality of taste than by any formal wish.’ ‘Goya’s love for the old masters,’ says Lafond, ‘is the best proof one can give of his sincerity. He did not think of inventing new processes; conscious that the same language is capable of a variety of expressions, he was content to master the technique of the past and to borrow from it all that best suited his individuality.’ But what he borrowed he moulded and modified to suit his own purposes; translating it into a language which was his own and in the process enlarging it with new and further life.

In 1779 Goya presented to the King his plates after the pictures of Velazquez. This series, which consisted of the portraits of Philip III., Philip IV., Margaret of Austria, Isabella of Bourbon, Prince Baltasar Carlos, the Count-Duke of Olivarez, and other etchings, are faithful though not inspired copies of the master. Goya wrote to Zapater that he had had the honour of being received by his Majesty and family when he submitted the plates for their inspection, and he adds, ‘I could not have wished them to be more pleased than they showed themselves to be on seeing them.’

Herr Valerian von Loga, who has an intimate acquaintance with and profound knowledge of Goya’s etchings and lithographs, has just published in Berlin a series of thirty-two reproductions of the rarest examples of the painter’s work in these media. The explanatory notes which accompany the plates are of great interest both to the student and the collector. This writer assumes that José del Castillo, who worked with Goya for the tapestry factory of Santa Bárbara, urged him to devote some of his restless activity to the etching needle. He holds that in his earlier attempts, and particularly in ‘The Flight into Egypt,’ the technique reminds one of Tiepolo. This etching is the work of an apprentice hand, and while it is not devoid of charm, it runs on bad lines. Goya’s acquaintance with the fundamental rules of etching was so imperfect that, in the first prints of his ‘St. Francisco de Paula,’ the inscription C. A. R. J. appears turned the wrong way. It is the opinion of Herr Valerian von Loga that in almost all the plates executed at this period there is a certain emptiness and unsteadiness of drawing, while the unsuccessful handling of light and shade betrays the work of the beginner, but ‘what is new and original, and above all, characteristic of Goya, is the manner in which the whole is worked out according to the painter’s mode of working. We see the artist taking pains, not to give form to the things themselves, but to their appearance. On this account outlines are omitted and contours left open, and there are no regularly-growing, flowing lines, while parallel and crossing strokes are rare. The dark surfaces are composed of a great number of short, chopped-off strokes; the entire workmanship is nervous and undecided. It is clear here that the ability of the artist was far behind the good-will, and at times too his inspiration was insufficient.’

In his copies of Velazquez Goya appears to have been the first to introduce into Spain Le Prince’s ten-year-old process of aquatinta, a process which in later times he developed to the highest perfection. In 1779 he brought out an etching from one of his own designs for the tapestry factory. His work so pleased the Prince of the Asturias, for whom it was executed, that the painter is credited with an intention of publishing all his Santa Bárbara pictures as etchings. But his growing popularity as a portrait painter now claimed his activities for more remunerative work, and for more than ten years he laid aside the etching needle in favour of the brush.

We learn from a memorial preserved in the Palace Archives that the graciousness of his reception, the success of his tapestry designs, and the admiration that Charles III. had expressed for his two religious studies of ‘Christ Crucified’ and of ‘St. Francis,’ emboldened the artist to proffer himself for the position of Court Painter. This honour was denied, but he was elected a member of the Académia de San Fernando.

On January 24, 1781, Goya left Madrid for Zaragoza to assist in the redecoration of the Church del Pilar under the direction of his brother-in-law, Francisco Bayeu. The dissensions which arose out of this commission between Bayeu and Goya, and between Goya and the Building Committee, were bitter and prolonged. It is not likely that the biographers of Goya, without the facts of the dispute to guide them to a correct conclusion, would display much sympathy with a conventional, mediocre painter like Bayeu, or so nebulous a body as an archbishop’s chapter, and Zapater and Cruzada have revealed their hero in the light of a persecuted, long-suffering martyr. The vanity and envy of Bayeu and the wilful obstinacy of the Building Committee in their support of the older artist they hold to have been at the bottom of the matter. But the Conde de la Viñaza has exhumed the hard facts in the archives of the Pilar Cathedral, and from these it is now clear that the indomitable independence of Goya’s nature and his impetuous intolerance of all restriction have not been taken sufficiently into account by his biographers.

From the documents which Viñaza has brought to light we learn that the frescoes which Bayeu completed in the Pilar Church, in 1776, gave so much satisfaction to the authorities that they agreed to the artist’s terms for painting the round vaults and cupolas of the church. Four years later, when the Building Committee were getting impatient for the work to be put in hand, they granted Bayeu permission to engage his brother Ramon and his brother-in-law Goya to assist in the execution of the designs which he had already prepared. On October 5, 1780, Ramon Bayeu and Goya presented these designs for the vaults. The Committee found that they were ‘inspired by the greatest taste’ and decided to proceed at once with the work. It may be assumed that Francisco Bayeu arrived shortly after to supervise the operations of his assistants, and it was not long before the disagreements between Goya and his brother-in-law commenced. On December 14 Bayeu complained that Goya would not be subject to correction in the manner of his painting, and he asked the Committee that he might be relieved of his responsibility in the direction of the work, in so far as Goya was concerned. We read that ‘the Committee, taking into account that Goya had come to paint, owing in a great measure to the pressure and eulogy of Bayeu in his letters, agreed that the Building Director (Canon Allué) should see Goya and his painting frequently, and mention any defects he might notice and impress upon him how grateful he ought to be for the good offices of D. Francisco Bayeu in engaging him as his assistant.’

Although it is evident that Goya was already in revolt against the supervision which he had accepted as a condition of his employment, the trouble was temporarily overborne. From this we may conclude that the good Allué did not insist too much upon the gratitude which Goya owed to his brother-in-law. By February Goya had completed the painting of the dome, and he then submitted his studies for the four triangles formed by the arches supporting it. It would appear that the public had expressed their dissatisfaction with Goya’s compositions in the dome, and the Committee complained that not only were these new designs marked by similar defects of ‘drapery, colouring, and idea,’ but one of the figures represented came short of the standard of chastity that was required in pictures of this kind. The Committee, ‘fearing to expose themselves to fresh censure and an accusation of negligence and want of care, put this matter, by reason of the confidence he had won from the Committee and from the whole chapter, under the direction and in the hands of D. Francisco Bayeu, hoping that he will take the trouble to see these studies and say whether the observations of the Committee are just in deciding that the triangles be painted in such a way that they may be shown to the public without fear of criticism.’ But when this resolution of the Committee was communicated to Bayeu, he retaliated with a tirade upon his offended dignity, and we find Allué appealing to Goya to ‘see if there be any way of arranging the matter, knowing that the Committee desire harmony, and do not wish to expose their conduct to censure, but desire only that the work be skilful and perfect.’

To this appeal Goya returned what we may describe as a characteristic letter. This epistle has been published in Spain, but no translation has hitherto appeared in England. The letter is as follows:—