TRANSLATION
Your Excellency,—I am in receipt of H.M. Royal Order which your excellency communicated to me on the 6th inst., accepting the offer of my work, the caprices on eighty copper plates engraved with aquafortis by my hand, which I will hand to the Royal Calcografia with the lot of prints which I had printed by way of precaution amounting to 240 copies of 80 prints each copy, in order not to defraud H.M. in the least and for my own satisfaction as to my mode of procedure.
I am very grateful for the pension of twelve thousand reals which H.M. has been pleased to concede to my son, for which I give my best thanks to H.M. and to your excellency.
Your excellency has not replied to a letter of mine, in which I said that the portraits were finished, and also the copy of your excellency’s by Esteve which only lacked the inscription for which he has asked me several times. I also suggested that if your excellency approved I would get the frames made for the originals and would myself go and put them where your excellency might order, so that you might have the pleasure of finding them in their places.
I only desire your excellency’s orders and that you keep well. May God preserve your excellency’s valuable life for many years.—Madrid, October 9, 1803.—Your excellency’s obedient and grateful servant,
Francisco de Goya.
To his Excellency Señor Don Miguel Cayetano Soler.
The technical excellence of the Caprichos makes them comparable with those of Rembrandt, while in their meaning and character they may be likened to the work of Daumier. There are the peculiar qualities of Goya’s etching, which recall the truth and naturalness of Fernando Boll, the movement and life of Lievens and Konninck, and the expression and charm of Von Vliet? These artists, whose best individual qualities are all combined in Goya, were pupils of Rembrandt. ‘Only Hokusai,’ writes Mr. Rothenstein, ‘was capable of such monstrous gaiety, such stinging satire, and he alone could have lent probability to such monstrous phantasy; Hogarth was too sermonising, Rowlandson too rollicking; a certain diabolical side of his nature, which Goya allowed to be seen both in the “Caprichos” and “The Disasters,” has probably prevented his etchings gaining a footing in England.’ Certain it is that Goya’s prints are rarely to be met with in this country—a fact that caused the writer of this book to spare no effort in order to include in the illustrations, reproductions of every etching and lithograph, as well as of every portrait or picture of Goya’s, of which he could secure an impression.
It is one thing to admire, even to understand, the technique of the ‘Caprichos,’ but to understand the precise significance of many of the plates is almost impossible. Perhaps the titles printed by Goya beneath the plates are the best guide to their meaning. The only reward to be derived from reading ingenious meanings into the prints is the personal interest one finds in the exercise. The series may be divided into three classes; the first are humorous satires of the foolishness and rottenness of the life of the period; the second are scathing assaults upon the ignorance and greed of the priesthood and the corruptness of the civic institutions; and the last are visions of witches and demons, which may be classed as pure phantasies. There is a depth of meaning in every plate, for Goya reproduces for us in them not only what he has seen, but what he has felt. The first plate illustrates a marriage of convenience, and we are shown the girl-bride being presented to her hideous suitor by her more hideous mother. Over and over again we are presented with this type of the ‘complaisant mother,’ which has been described by Théophile Gautier in illuminating prose. ‘It is impossible’ he writes, ‘to fancy anything more grotesquely horrible, more viciously deformed. Each of these frightful old shrews unites in her own person the ugliness of the seven capital sins; compared to them the Prince of Darkness himself is pretty. Just fancy whole ditches and counterscarps of wrinkles; eyes like live coals that have been extinguished in blood; noses like the neck of an alembic covered with warts and other excrescences; nostrils like those of an hippopotamus rendered formidable by stiff bristles; whiskers like a tiger’s; a mouth like the slit in the top of a money-box, contracted by a horrible and convulsive grin; a something between the spider and the multiped which makes you feel the same kind of disgust as if you had placed your foot upon the belly of a toad.’ The description is horrible even as Goya’s engravings are horrible, and as excellently true as the work by which it was inspired.
It is not possible in the space at our command to review these ‘Caprichos’ in detail, and fortunately it is not necessary. The reader can examine the plates for himself and study their details. He will remark the skill with which the engraver endows ‘The Garroted Man’ with its sombre, gruesome tone; the sense of the unavailing, despairing effort with which the living skeleton in ‘And yet they do not go’ (Plate 369) supports the slab of stone which must inevitably fall and crush the crouching, scarcely human wretches who anticipate their fate with expressions of such lurid horror. One can feel the violence of the wind that buffets the women in ‘A Bad Night’; we enter into the terror of the woman who is employed in her hideous task in ‘Tooth Hunting.’ Here indeed, ‘horror confronts us; corruptness is imagined with an unapproachable depth of grotesqueness.’ In all the realm of art there is nothing to compare with the horror and grotesquerie of these Caprices.
Goya’s next work was the thirty-three plates of ‘The Tauromachia.’ This series of engravings was so brilliant in execution and appealed so strongly in their theme and treatment to the Spanish national affection for the bull-ring, that doubtless they would have brought the etcher even greater contemporary fame than the larger series, but for some unexplained reason, they were not publicly issued until after his death and the death of his only surviving legitimate son. In the ‘Tauromachia’ Goya made less use of aquatint and aquafortis, and, as in his later etchings, relied more and more upon the needle to produce his effects. These scenes of the bull-ring represent the different phases of the combat and the surpassing feats of its most famous exponents. The ‘Caprices’ may appeal more strongly in some respects, but the drawing in the plates of the ‘Tauromachia’ is extremely light and facile, and the illusion of vigorous movement is seen in them all.
In 1803 Goya was fifty-seven years old. The corruption in high places, against which he had hurled his darts, was fast driving Spain into the grasp of the world-power which was menacing all Europe. Napoleon’s ambitious designs embraced the mastership of the Peninsula, and he was already maturing his plans to that end. In 1803 the English and French were again at war. Napoleon demanded, under the treaty of St. Ildefonso, that Spain should declare war against England. Godoy strove fiercely to resist the will of the tyrant. Napoleon ordered the dismissal of Godoy. Spain purchased her neutrality in hard cash, and Godoy was retained. In 1804 Napoleon was proclaimed Emperor, and the neutrality of the Spaniards was reduced to such a farce beneath the grinding importunities of the imperial ally that Pitt declared war against Spain in December of that year. The battle of Trafalgar was fought on October 21, 1805, but before the end of the year Napoleon had entered Vienna and won the battle of Austerlitz. Before the awful menace of his growing power, Godoy sued for the favour of the conqueror in gold drawn from the Spanish funds. The Emperor accepted the money without relaxing his animus against the despised favourite, who was forced to approach England with proposals for an anti-French coalition. His overtures were ignored. The Queen and the King heaped new honours upon the Prince of the Peace, but his end and that of his august patrons was near. Ferdinand’s party was working the country into a ferment of hatred against Godoy, and Napoleon’s inflexible aversion sealed his doom. In 1807 Ferdinand truckled to the ‘Scourge of Europe’ by asking for a lady of Napoleon’s family for a wife, while Godoy urged upon Napoleon the occupation of Portugal as a preliminary to the introduction of French troops into Spain. In October 1807 Portugal proving refractory, Junot and a strong force encamped on Spanish soil and were made welcome by the Prince of the Asturias and the Prince of the Peace, both of whom regarded the invasion of the French as a friendly move, in support of their respective interests.
In the same month the Court was stricken by the exposure of the plot and counterplot planned by the rascally favourite and the intriguing Crown Prince. Godoy was charged by Ferdinand with the intention of killing the King and his family and seizing the throne; Ferdinand was surprised in a plot which embraced the imprisonment if not the death of his father. The Prince of the Asturias was placed under arrest, and the King applied to Napoleon for his advice. Junot marched into Portugal; French troops poured into Spain; the Portuguese Regent, at the advice of Lord Strangford, transferred his court to Brazil. On March 17, 1808, the troops, in favour of Ferdinand, prevented Godoy from leaving Aranguez, and two days later threw him, bruised and bleeding, at the feet of the Prince of the Asturias, who gave his father to understand that, by virtue of the presence in the capital of his friends the French, he was absolute master of the situation. Charles IV. signed a decree which made Ferdinand VII. sovereign of Spain. A few days later he put his name to a private withdrawal of his abdication; and this document was forwarded to Napoleon, with a letter offering to conform to whatever the Emperor might order with regard to him, his queen, and the Prince of the Peace. Napoleon came south towards Spain. Ferdinand, who hastened north to meet him, entered Bayonne to find himself a prisoner. Charles IV., with Maria Luisa and Godoy, followed to Bayonne, and Ferdinand was compelled to restore the crown to his father, who transferred it to Napoleon. The cash consideration the King was to receive for his sovereignty was never paid.
While these base traffickings were occupying the King and his family, the gallant loyalists of Madrid had risen against the French and suffered massacre on the terrible Dos de Mayo. Once again the country was in arms; the Spaniards fought—to instance only the sieges of Zaragoza and Valencia—with superb valour, but the Junta continued its servile negotiations with Napoleon, and Joseph Buonaparte, King of Naples, was summoned by his brother to rule over Spain. On July 9, 1808, Joseph I. set foot in his new kingdom. On the 17th the French were defeated in the battle of Baileu, and the victorious Spanish troops advanced over the Sierra Morena to Madrid. The new king fled the capital. Napoleon in person took command of the army which was to reconquer Spain, and advanced into the heart of Castile. The left division of the Spanish army was defeated on November 11, the right was driven into the mountains of Aragon, the centre was completely crushed at Tudela on November 26. A fortnight later the Emperor entered Madrid, and Joseph I. was restored to the throne of Spain.
Goya’s position was rendered acutely difficult by these drastic changes. The first painter of the exiled King, the favourite of his dispersed courtiers, what could he do in the court of the hated Joseph Buonaparte? It may be surmised that ‘the good old Goya,’ as Gautier familiarly styles him, hated the new order of things, but he was no visionary patriot burning with the fire of useless sacrifice. His love of country was not love of Charles IV. or his son; he loved Spain not less because Maria Luisa and Godoy were out of it. And as he asked himself what action he should take, he saw the Prince of the Asturias submit himself to the new ruler, and with him Jove-Llanos, Mazarrado and Urquijo, the Dukes of Fernan Nuñez and del Parque, the Count of Santa Colonna, the Cardinal of Bourbon—to mention a few only among the nobles. Goya’s comrades also, the Court painters, Mariano Maëlla, Francisco Ramos, and Pablo Racio, acknowledged the ‘intrusive king’! Goya hesitated no longer. He took the oath of allegiance to Joseph I. He was made a knight of the Legion of Honour. He painted the usurper’s portrait, and some time later accepted, with Napoli and Maëlla, the commission to select from the treasures of the royal gallery fifty of the most beautiful pictures which were to be sent to the Louvre.
But though the old order had changed and Goya had changed with it, his spirit was full of bitterness. He had witnessed the butchery and slaughter of the French soldiers; he hated the sound of the clanking of the spurs of Murat’s hussars on the pavements of Madrid.
Already he had painted two pictures, the ‘Dos de Mayo’ and ‘Un Episodio de la Invasión Francesca.’ One has only to study these two pictures of realised terror, in the Prado, to understand the painter’s hatred of the French and the brooding melancholy which the events of the rising in Madrid had fastened upon his soul and darkened his life. De Amicis, the Italian author, writes, with a fine appreciation of the stirring realism of these works: ‘Nothing more tremendous can be imagined: one can give no more execrable form to power, nor frightful aspect to desperation, nor a more ferocious expression to the fury of a fray. In the first one there is a dark sky, the light of a lantern, a pool of blood, a pile of bodies, a crowd of men condemned to death, and a line of French soldiers in the act of firing; in the other are horses with their veins cut, and horsemen dragged from their saddles, stabbed, trodden upon, and lacerated. What faces! What attitudes! One seems to hear the cries and see the blood running: the veritable scene could not cause more horror. Goya must have painted these pictures with his eyes glaring, foam at his mouth, and with the fury of a demoniac; it is the last point which painting can reach before being translated into action; having passed that point one throws away the brush and seizes the dagger; one must commit murder in order to do anything more terrible than those pictures; after those colours, comes blood.’
Goya retired to the seclusion of his house outside the gates of the capital, only opening his doors to a few old friends, among whom were Cean Bermudez the art critic, Carnicero the illustrator of Don Quixote, Castillo the painter, and Selma the engraver. The old painter had become completely deaf, and, in these dark days of change and violence, the bitterness of his spirit found further expression in the ‘Desastres de la Guerra’—‘the cry of a just soul against the iniquity of warfare.’ With passionate vigour he depicted the horrors of the French invasion and lashed with his satire the barbarities of the conquerors. The new series was begun in the year 1810. They reproduce all the sad and abominable events which had culminated in the accession of Joseph Bonaparte. Callot, in his scenes of the barbarities of the Thirty Years’ War, did not attain the fire, the power, or the purpose of these plates. All the horrors of warfare and its heroism and the stupidity of war are depicted here with searching truth. The technique of the plates is unsurpassed. We see starving men made bestial with terror, dead bodies stripped and mutilated, women outraged, and children butchered before the eyes of their frenzied mothers. And again we are shown the superb heroism of the women who, armed only with hatchets and stones, withstood the onslaught of the dragoons; we are made to realise the intrepid loyalty of those men and women who fought side by side on the terrible Dos de Mayo; we witness the masculine daring of the women who took the match from the hands of the dead artillerymen and continued to work the guns. Every phase of warfare, its famine and desolation, its hunger and disease, its heroism and its savagery, are depicted in this impeachment of Militarism. The utter uselessness of war is emphasised in the haunting echo which runs through all the plates—‘To what end?’ The wasteful sacrifice of human lives is forced upon Goya’s audience by an engraving in this series inscribed with the word ‘Nada’ (Nothingness). Gautier in his rare volume, Travels in Spain (so rare that I need make no apology for again quoting from it), writes of this plate: ‘Among these drawings which admit of an easy explanation, there is one fearfully terrible and mysterious, the meaning of which, that we can dimly understand, fills you with horror and affright. It is a corpse, half-buried in the earth; it is supporting itself on its elbow, and, without looking at what it is writing, traces with its bony hand, on a paper placed near it, one word—“Nothingness”—which is alone worth the most terrible things Dante ever penned. Around its head, on which there is just enough flesh left to render it more frightful than a mere skull, flit, scarcely visible in the darkness of the night, a number of monstrous spectres, lighted up here and there by flashes of vivid lightning. A fatidical hand holds a pair of scales, which are in the act of turning upside down. Can you conceive anything more sinister or more heartrending?’
The ‘Disasters’ were not published in a series until 1863, when the Academy of San Fernando acquired eighty plates and issued the engravings with a brief introductory note. In this introduction the writer says: ‘The collection which Goya designated by the name of Ravages or Disasters of War, is indisputably one of the most notable of the kind that he produced. In it is all the strength of his lively imagination, exalted and excited by a deep patriotic feeling in those terrible moments when an unjust foreign invasion essayed to humiliate the pride and hauteur which are a characteristic of the Spaniard. What matter for surprise then that a Spaniard, an Aragonese, a man with the stern independent character of Goya, should allow himself to be carried away very often by exaggeration and caricature?... On the other hand, this work breathes novelty in the subjects, originality in the types, fire in the composition, boldness and firmness in the colouring, decision and even fineness in the design.... In order that nothing shall be lacking in this collection, there is given on each plate the inscriptions which afford another proof of the artist’s genius. These inscriptions, concise, incisive, and piquant, add character, if that be possible, to what the pencil had already accomplished; the brief phrases, at times a single word, reveal by their sense of rapidity the fugitive idea which his mind had conceived in a moment, and which, in little more than another moment, his hand had represented.’
A very interesting series of drawings and etchings are preserved in the Print Room of the British Museum. Of these ten are reproduced in this book for the first time. The Goya collection in the Museum consists of eight original drawings, a holograph letter of Goya and no fewer than two hundred and eighty-one separate works, comprising etchings and lithographs of the Proverbs, Caprices, Tauromachia, and Disasters of War, and the subjects after Velazquez. They are all in a splendid state of preservation. Of the selection made for the present volume (Nos. 601-12), the portrait of the Duke of Wellington (601) and ‘A Lost Soul’ (605), have been reproduced by Mr. Rothenstein. The sketch of the Duke, whom Goya in the letter referred to, writes ‘Weelingthon,’ served the painter in executing the large portrait. It was made on the day following the battle of Salamanca (1812), when Marmont was defeated on the field of Arapiles. The ‘Lady and Gentleman on Horseback’ (No. 602) have not been identified, although the picture is evidently a portrait. The head of Fray Juan Fernanez (No. 603), drawn at the moment of his last breath, is a very powerful sketch. In No. 609 the artist depicts misery in a few masterly touches, and in Nos. 607, 608, and 609 he illustrates proverbs with his peculiar freakish fancy. The study of bulls (610) is another spirited sketch. The remaining plates represent scenes of the bull-ring.
Goya still brooded over the misfortunes which the Royal family and their hated favourite between them had brought about by folly, ignorance, and baseness; and over the sufferers, the common people, who still sacrificed their lives to reinstate their corrupt but accustomed oppressors. But the end was near. The leading patriots, assembled at Cadiz, were engaged in framing a constitution which was to mark the commencement of modern Spain. Meanwhile Wellington was driving the French troops before him—Olivenza, Fuentes de Oñoro, Almeida, Albuera, Ciudad Rodrigo, and Badajoz indicate the line of their retreat. The country was being drained and devastated to provide money for continuing the war. Joseph was providing bull-fights and shows to divert the mind of the Madrileños from the national misery. Napoleon was overwhelming his brother with blame for a state of affairs which was neither of his making nor controlling. Madrid, cut off from supplies, was wasted by an appalling visitation of famine which lasted from September 1811 to August 1812, when Wellington’s liberating army reached the capital to find that Joseph had already beaten a retreat. The Napoleonic rule was over. Joseph returned to Madrid, but it was only to pack up his belongings, to loot churches and palaces and retire with the plunder to France. On June 21, 1813, Wellington met the retiring intruders at Vittoria, and Joseph, with a greatly diminished burden of treasure, barely escaped with his life. Thereafter Napoleon abandoned his schemes of Spanish conquest; Ferdinand, the prisoner of Valençay,—who had danced in captivity while his country bled, who still sought a marital alliance with the house of Buonaparte, who had slobbered his felicitations on the birth of the King of Rome and congratulated the Emperor upon his victory over the Spaniards—Ferdinand was now free to receive the welcome which his loyal countrymen were eager to give him.
Ferdinand ‘the desired,’ after swearing to respect the new constitution, re-entered Spain in March 1814 amidst an incredible outburst of popular enthusiasm. Two days before he reached Madrid every member of the Cortes and every known friend of the constitution was thrown into prison. By the publication of the decree of Valencia he proclaimed himself an autocrat, by his acts he proved himself a tyrant. He re-established the Inquisition, he decreed the ancient taxes; the country, desolated by war waged on his behalf, was thrown into lamentable disorder by the greed of the coarse and ignorant bloodsuckers whom the King gathered around him. Charles IV. was a paternal sovereign, and Joseph I. was an enlightened ruler beside Ferdinand VII. Neither Liberals nor Conservatives were safe. He imprisoned the men who had striven and bled to effect his return; he persecuted without mercy those who had sworn allegiance to Joseph. Goya was one of the first and fiercest, according to Lafond, to acclaim the return of the King. For a time he sought refuge from his sovereign in the house of his friend José Duaso y Latre, who kept him in hiding for three months. At the expiration of that time he found that Ferdinand was inclined to condone his defection. It is reported that he pardoned him with the words, ‘In our absence you have deserved exile, nay worse, you have merited death; but you are a great artist, and we will forget everything.’
So ‘the good old Goya’ was reinstated as Court painter, and he executed several portraits of the new sovereign. It is evident from these likenesses that the painter recognised the weakness and worthlessness of Ferdinand. He viewed his sitter in the same clear, critical, uncompromising spirit with which he had gazed on his royal parents; he painted the weak, shifty, uncultured despot as he was. The equestrian portrait of Ferdinand VII. is commonplace. His portrait of the monarch in his gorgeous mantle is almost a caricature of royalty, and in his other likenesses he betrays his antipathy to the restored Bourbon. That Goya’s palette still emitted ‘rays of prodigious art’ when he painted people who were congenial to him, is shown by many of the portraits of this period; for instance, by that of the Marquis de San Adrián, of Don Ignacio Garcini and his wife, of Don Evaristo Pérez de Castro, and by the beautiful study of Goya’s little niece, La Felicianæ, which is one of the tenderest and most delicate of all his portraits.
Another royal commission entrusted to Goya was to paint episodes of the war, especially of the siege of Zaragoza. Accompanied by his pupil Luis Gil Ranz, he set out to obtain studies. Owing to the exaltation of the populace the journey is said to have abounded in incidents and perils. The language of signs which Ranz employed in conversing with his deaf master caused them to be mistaken for spies. They were forced to seek sanctuary at Renales, the pupil’s native town, where they waited until a favourable opportunity offered for their return to Madrid.
The melancholy which had settled upon Goya after the accession of the intrusive King increased with advancing age. In the seclusion of his house (the house in which he had entertained the noblest of the Court circle—the Deaf Man’s House, as it came to be called by the Madrileños) he beguiled the time by painting the walls with fantastic and gruesome visions which gave it an awesome and startling appearance. But the brilliant fancy had been obscured by the national vicissitudes he had witnessed and the haunting memories of the war obsessed his imagination. These paintings, which are now preserved in the Prado, produce a painful impression; they would seem to be the creations of a fevered brain.
In 1817 Goya visited Seville to paint the picture of Santas Justa and Rufina for the Cathedral, to which reference has been made. On his return he designed a new series of Caprices, and executed many portraits and miniatures on ivory. It was at this time, too, that he made his first essay in lithography. The earliest of these lithographs is a fine brush drawing of an old woman spinning. It is signed and dated February 1819. Among the drawings upon stone that were executed about this period, the two most important are ‘Los Chiens,’ a bull attacked by dogs, and the splendid diabolical scene of a man being dragged along by demons. This last, which is in the Print Room of the British Museum, has special interest, as it is the first known wash drawing made upon the stone. M. Lefort mentions six other lithographs which were executed at Madrid before the journey to France: a duel between two people, a young woman reading to two children, a monk, a girl sitting on the knee of an old woman with other women in the background, a drunkard and a woman, and a peasant assaulting a girl.
The date of the execution of ‘Los Proverbios,’ the fourth series of Goya’s etchings,—‘the last thunderbolt of his genius,’—is uncertain. Probably they belong to those years when, under the weight of distress of spirits in his lonely home on the Manzanares, he sketched the world within him as it appeared to his gloomy imagination. The plates are without explanatory titles, and their meaning is obscure. Mr. Rothenstein finds in the larger size and broader execution of the plates themselves the reason for his belief that these are the last etchings by Goya’s hand before his failing eyesight forced him to lay aside the needle. The plates were first printed in 1830. This edition was edited with little care, and in 1864 a second edition was undertaken by the Academy of San Fernando. There were eighteen of these plates, but three more, reproduced much later in L’Art, may be placed among them.
There remain several important etchings; among them the three fine and impressive plates of ‘The Prisoners’ come first in importance. In these, as Mr. Rothenstein has said, ‘Goya’s powers as an etcher and his sympathy for suffering are demonstrated in a striking and singularly direct manner.’ Beneath the prints he has written in three sentences, his last protest against injustice: ‘The safe guarding of a prisoner does not necessitate torture’; ‘If he is guilty, why not kill him at once?’ ‘So much barbarity in the treatment equals the crime committed.’ The first proofs of these prints Goya gave to his friend, Cean Bermudez. The plates known as Obras Sueltas were not, as far as we know, printed in Goya’s lifetime. They show a man swinging a woman on a swing, with a cat watching her from the bough of a tree; a bull-fighter with a bull lying down behind him; and two representations of majas. They were first etched at Bordeaux, and from the somewhat crude style of the work, probably were the last prints executed by Goya.
Among several unconnected prints we may mention the superb engraving of ‘The Colossus,’ which seems like an etching at first glance and has defied the attempts of experts to explain the highly complicated process of its execution. As an illustration of Goya’s resources for producing a marvellous impression, this piece constitutes a veritable tour de force. The giant is placed in a vast landscape, and beside his uncouth might and Herculean muscles, cities and villages seem diminutive and insignificant atoms of the soil on which he rests. He is frightened into wakefulness by the morning sun which touches his mighty head and shoulders; they seem as if the summit of a mountain, while his feet are yet in the shadow of night. A mysterious, pale, fantastic effect of moonlight throws a peculiar atmosphere about the figure. As we have already remarked, the process by which the effect is obtained remains inexplicable. According to a statement made by Goya’s grandson, the engraver employed a very soft metal plate from which only three impressions could be taken. One of these impressions is in the National Library of Madrid. A brilliant and rare old engraving of ‘A Blind Guitar Player,’ a large but inferior plate of a popular scene, and three etchings of religious subjects, complete the list of Goya’s miscellaneous etchings.
In June 1824, at the age of seventy-six, Goya set out for France. Before starting he painted his ‘San José de Calasanz receiving the Sacrament’—perhaps his finest religious composition. The work was scarcely dry when he sought and obtained the King’s permission to take the mineral waters at Plombières in France. The remainder of his life’s story is soon told. In Paris he made the personal acquaintance of Vernet, and found delight in the works of Gros, of Géricault, and of Delacroix. The last master did honour to Goya by copying every plate of the ‘Caprichos.’ But the full life of Paris was too overwhelming for the old painter, and having obtained in January 1825 a six months’ extension of leave from the King, he settled down in Bordeaux with his devoted friends, Mme. Weiss and her daughter. In the little Spanish colony on the pleasant banks of the Garonne, he had for companions Joseph de Carnerero, the marine painter, Antonio de Brugada, the members of the family of Goicoechea, and Pio de Molina, and Moratin, whose portraits he painted. But these pictures do not represent his full powers; the colours are heavy and sometimes crude; he worked with double magnifying glasses and a stout lens. But in his engraving, and especially in his series of lithographs, ‘Les Taureaux de Bordeaux,’ which Mr. Rothenstein describes as ‘the most remarkable compositions of his life, certainly the greatest and most significant lithographs in the history of the art,’ his old powers shine forth again in undimmed brilliance.
In 1826 the feeling of home-sickness drew him back to Madrid. At Court he was received with every mark of respect. The King granted him a superannuation salary of 50,000 reals and permission to return to France, ‘in order that he may again take the baths which have done him so much good.’ His Majesty requested him to sit to Vicente López y Portaña, in order that he might possess a picture of ‘the greatest painter Spain has seen since Velazquez.’ López painted ‘the good old Goya’ life-size, seated full-face, palette in the left hand, brush in the right, and wearing an unbuttoned frockcoat. The portrait was executed in a few hours, for at the second sitting Goya carried away the portrait, assuring the painter that he would only spoil the likeness if he persevered any further with ‘his niggling brush.’ It is said that he took palette and brush and essayed a portrait of López, but his hand, cold and trembling, refused to respond to the call made upon it, and the attempt was a failure.
The royal pension and permission to return to France is dated July 17, 1826. Accompanied by his grandson, Mariano, he betook himself again to Bordeaux. His declining years were cheered by the affectionate attentions of his young compatriot, Antonio de Brugada, who attended him in his infrequent strolls, suffered patiently his querulous moods, and even played to him on the piano the national airs which the old man could not hear. In one last flash of his genius Goya painted an admirable portrait of Juan Maguiro. It was his last work, and beneath the signature he inscribed his age—eighty-one years.
In March 1828 a premonition that his end was near filled Goya with a strong desire to see his son once more before he died. When he heard that his wish was to be realised he wrote to his son: ‘Dear Xavier,—I can only tell you that this great pleasure has somewhat indisposed me and I am in bed. God grant that I can see you when you come, and then I shall be quite satisfied. Good-bye.—Your father, Francisco.’ Xavier reached Bordeaux on March 13. Three days later Goya had a paralytic seizure, and surrounded by his family and his intimate friends, ‘the greatest painter that Spain has seen since Velazquez,’ breathed his last.
On the following day the remains of Goya were buried in the Goicoechea family vault in the Grand Chartreux Cemetery of Bordeaux, and the following inscription was engraved on the stone:—
✝
SEPULTURA
DE LA FAMILIA
DE
GOICOECHEA
——
AL MEJOR DE LOS PADRES
——
EL AMOR FILIAL
ELEVA ESTE MONUMENTO
A LA MEMORIA
DE Dn MARTIN MIGUEL
DE GOICOECHEA
DEL COMMERCIO DE MADRID
NACIO EN ALSASUA
REYNO DE NAVARRA
EL 27 DE OCTUBRE DE 1755
Y FALLECIO EN BURDEOS
EL 30 DE JUNIO DE 1825
——
ROGAD Á DIOS POR SU ALMA
——
HIC JACET
FRANCISCUS A GOYA ET LUCIENTES
HISPANIENSIS PERITISSIMUS PICTOR
MAGNAQUE SUI NOMINIS
CELEBRITATE NOTUS
DECURSO, PROBE, LUMINE VITAE
OBIIT XVI. KALENDAS MARCII
ANNO DOMINI
M.DCCC.XXVIII.
AETATIS SUAE
LXXXV.
——
R. I. P.
Goya’s remains were removed to Spain at the end of the nineteenth century. On the afternoon of May 11, 1900, the body was placed in the San Isidro Cemetery, Madrid, by the side of his old friends Menéndez Valdés and Leandro Moratin. Already in 1888 the Cortes had voted a sum of money for the creation of a suitable monument, and a magnificent cenotaph now marks the resting-place of the last great Spanish painter.
Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press