Goya, an account of his life and works

by Albert Frederick Calvert

The source of the trouble was the failure of the Committee to accept Goya at his own estimate, which was certainly the true one, as the superior of Bayeu. The young painter doubtless did his best to follow the advice of Father Salzedo, but he wore the robes of humility with a bad grace, and was impatient of ignorant and pedantic criticism. His position had become untenable. The painter received his payment, his wife accepted her medals, and they left Zaragoza for Madrid in June 1781.

Goya was indulging no empty boast when he intimated, in his memorial to the Building Committee, that his renown in Madrid was widely acknowledged. He was no sooner back in the capital than the Conde de Florida Blanca sent him a royal order to paint one of the pictures for the Church of San Francisco el Grande. The favoured minister also presented him to the Infante don Luis, the brother of the King and husband of Maria Teresa Vallabriga, who at once conceived a great liking for the painter. He spent a month at the palace of Arenas de San Pedro, and was entertained with great hospitality, while he executed portraits of the Infante’s family. He also painted for the Consejo de las Ordenes several devotional pictures for the Calatrava College at the Salamanca University. In his leisure hours he worked at his picture in the Church of St. Francis. This work was not completed until November 1784. The pictures were ceremoniously unveiled on the 8th of December, in the presence of the King and his court. The occasion was a triumph for Goya. Other pictures had been painted by Bayeu, Mariano Maëlla, Gregorio Farro, Antonio Velazquez, Joseph del Castillo, and Andres Calleja. But their work was eclipsed by the composition in which the magic brush of the Aragonese represented San Bernardino de Siena. The saint is shown with a crucifix in his hand, standing on a rock, preaching, by the light of a brilliant star, to the wonder-filled King Alfonso of Aragon and his court.

Great was the admiration which this picture won for the artist, but, as was usual in Spain, he experienced much difficulty in obtaining payment for his work. In April 1785 we find Goya, Farro, and Castillo memorialising the Conde de Florida Blanca for pecuniary acknowledgment of their labours, explaining that they had each spent two years in making sketches and studies and in the execution of their several pictures, and pointing out that they are obliged to gain their livelihood with their work and ‘have no income or assistance, like others who have the good fortune to serve his Majesty.’ This memorial was despatched with a covering letter from Antonio Ponz, who emphasises the fact that the painters are in need, and hopes that their request will be complied with, ‘in order that these poor men may not lose heart and that reward shall hearten them to fresh work.’ Three months late Florida Blanca arranged with the general directors at the post-office to hand the artists ‘six thousand reals for the present until something else is arranged.’ This payment is duly noted on the memorial, and a later marginal order, presumably in the Count’s handwriting, reads: ‘Pay another 4000 reals to each, although the pictures are nothing wonderful, but theirs are the best.’ This grudging eulogy was in striking contrast with the enthusiastic praise bestowed upon Goya’s pictures for the Salamanca College by the Consejo de las Ordenes, who instructed Jove-Llanos to assure the artist that he was ‘singularly satisfied with the care and diligence with which he had finished the paintings and with their eminent merit.’

In the year of his return to Madrid Goya’s father died, and the painter sent for his mother and his brother Camilo to join him. He obtained for Camilo a chaplainship at Chinchón, but his mother soon wearied of the unaccustomed noise and bustle of the city and retired to Zaragoza, where she lived on a pension of five reals per diem provided by Goya. The artist at this time may have found some difficulty in providing for his household; for his family, if not long-lived, was numerous, but it is unlikely that he ever felt the pinch of poverty. We can well believe that he was insistent in obtaining the reward of his labours, especially when he was working for princes who, in his view, were living a life of gilded pauperism, and the stress which Ponz lays upon the needs of these ‘poor men’ is far removed from the attitude assumed by Goya. In the letter, in which he applies for payment, he does not plead for a dole in relief of his poverty, but demands the remuneration which is justly due to him. This is the only recorded instance of his being in financial straits. From this time his career is one of eventful and interrupted but assured success. Fame and fortune attended him on either hand. In 1785 Andreas Calleja died, and Goya succeeded him as deputy director of the Academy of San Fernando, with an annual salary of twenty-five doubloons. Four years later, on the death of Cornelio van der Goten, Charles IV., who had just succeeded his father Charles III., appointed him a Painter of the Chamber, with a salary of 15,000 reals, which was increased in 1799 to 50,000 reals a year, with the rank of first painter to the King.

In this period of his greatest prosperity, Goya was courted not only for the sake of his art, but also for his personal qualities. He was popular with men, while women eagerly contended for his favour. A revolutionary, he became the friend of the King, while the Queen and the Countess of Benavente delighted in his companionship. He went from palace to palace and from fête to fête, observing, working, studying, revelling in the life by which he was surrounded and in which he played a full part. This lover of freedom could breathe in an atmosphere of corruption; this son of the soil could play the courtier with a will. ‘If we are to understand his genius rightly,’ says C. Gasquoine Hartley, in A Record of Spanish Painting, ‘all contradictions are solved when we realise that he was an onlooker at, rather than an operator in, many incidents of his life.’ This half-hearted attempt to condone the irregularity of his life at this period is at variance both with what we know of Goya’s temperament and with the facts. He was an actor as well as an interpreter of the scenes which he represents, and many of his pictures, which are regarded as biting satires of the follies and vice of his age, are quite as plausibly explained as the expression of personal animus and party feeling. Certain people have discovered in Goya a moralist after the style of Hogarth, using his brush in the sacred cause of morality, to expose the vices of his time, laying bare the baseness of his contemporaries in order to inspire contempt and horror of their conduct, stigmatising the habits of the court of Charles IV., and castigating the hypocrisy, ignorance, and immodesty of the men and women who surrounded the royal family. But while in the later works of his mature age he employed his brush and needle to this purpose, it is more probable, as Lafond concludes, that under Charles IV. and Maria Luisa, Goya drew and engraved, as La Fontaine wrote his fables: for the pleasure of producing them, from the necessity of multiplying them, not troubling himself about questions of morality or of the lessons which his pictures should teach. ‘The truth is,’ says his French biographer, ‘that, mixed up in the intrigues of the Court and involved in personal quarrels, he takes the part now of one, now of another, using his pen to scratch his adversaries of to-day who are his allies to-morrow.’ In all his works he imbued the subject with the quality of his thought as well as with the charm of his colour and the skill of his draughtmanship. Of all the artists of his class, says the Boletin de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, none put into their studies more meaning and personal opinion. If he painted a scene he attached to it a proverb or a significant ejaculation; if he produced a portrait he left upon the likeness his opinion of his model; if in many cases it amounted to a positive caricature, he could no more help seeing his subject in that guise than his subject could avoid so appearing to the artist.

With regard to Goya’s personal life at this period it is not necessary to say much, but it would seem to have been consistent with our knowledge of him and of his surroundings. Lafond reminds us that his wife bore him twenty children and continued to love him in spite of his endless infidelities. Mr. Rotherstein declares that while it would be idle to pretend that he was faithful to his wife, it is undeniable that he was deeply attached to her during her lifetime. With the single exception of his devotion to the unfortunate Duchess of Alba, says the same writer, his intrigues seem to have been as much caprices on the part of his sitters as his own. But these caprices were, as it has been said, endless. ‘We have only to look at the master’s self-portrait,’ writes Richard Muther, ‘at this man with the bull-neck and full, sensual lips, to understand that the countless stories which got about on the subject of his relations with the women of high society in Madrid were not all inventions of the fancy. Goya must have been a terror to all their husbands. In all the most aristocratic salons the women were at his feet; and perhaps they appreciated the difference between this sturdy man of the people and their decadent lords and masters. In a word, Goya at this time not only painted Rococo, but lived himself to its full the wild passionate life of that Rococo period.’ And again, in the Boletin de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, we get the shrewd and common-sense conclusion that ‘Goya was a man of his age. He neither aspired to the category of an ascetic nor opposed the customs and tendencies of his time, and his age being one of transition, without fixed principles, he accommodated himself to its duties and its weaknesses, never for a moment failing in his domestic obligations, yet not refusing those outside favours that presented themselves to him.’

It would have been strange indeed if Goya had resisted the temptations by which he was surrounded; it is remarkable under the circumstances that he remained unspoiled. The King, as we have seen, was his friend, the Queen confided to him her most delicate secrets, the all-powerful Prince de la Pax made him welcome at Aranjuez, and the most distinguished women of the day delighted in entertaining him. Writing to his friend Zapater about his success at this period, he said: ‘I had established for myself an enviable mode of life; I no longer danced attendance in an ante-chamber; if anybody wanted anything of mine he had to come to me. I was much sought after, but if it was not anybody in a high position, or to oblige a friend, I worked for none.’ He was a privileged guest at the palaces of the Marchioness of Santa Cruz and of San Carlos; Brunetti and the Countess of Benavente fêted him. His relations with the beautiful and vivacious Duchess of Alba are too well known to call for more than a passing mention. The artist painted at least a dozen portraits of the Duchess, in one of which he presents himself in company with his inamorata. He introduced her piquant features into the frescoes of San Antonio de la Florida. She is the model for the nude and clothed Maja which hang in the Prado Museum. Tradition has it that the clothed Maja was painted to meet the wishes of the Duke, who expressed a desire to inspect the master’s work. The story is almost comical to any one who has stood in front of the two pictures. Nothing but the most conventional views upon the subject of the nude could make the naked study more offensive in the eyes of a husband than the one in which the young woman, ‘naked in spite of her dress,’ appears to challenge the continence of all the St. Anthonys of Christendom.

Of these pictures Mr. Charles Ricketts writes in an illuminating chapter on The Masterpieces of the Prado: ‘Goya’s two pictures are still vivacious and fresh. In “La Maja,” a nude, he has painted the sensuous waist, the frail arms, the dainty head of the Duchess thrown upon pillows, contrasting in their gray whiteness with the gleam upon her flesh. In the other we note the same grace of pose, a more summary workmanship, touches of colour—too many perhaps. The Duchess of Alba (La Maja) reclines on her divan in her rich bolero and white duck trousers of a toreador or Spanish dandy. We pause, we are astonished and charmed; we wonder how such a thing was possible. Her beauty and daring live on the two canvases; this one scandal in the nineteenth century has endowed the world with those pictures, and they are now in the Prado. So ends the adventure.’

The scandal which associated Goya’s name with that of the Duchess of Alba, fanned, it may be suspected, by the jealousy of the Countess of Benavente, could not be concealed, and by the order of Maria Luisa, the Duchess was banished in 1795 to the seclusion of her estate at San Lucar. The painter immediately obtained from the King a prolonged leave of absence and accompanied her into exile. On the journey to San Lucar an accident happened to their carriage, and Goya with his characteristic energy set to work to repair the defect. An iron bar belonging to the coach was buckled; a fire had to be lighted and the iron made straight. The heat and the unwonted exertion which the operation entailed was followed by a chill, and from this chill resulted the deafness which, in later years, became complete. The Duchess was recalled in the following year—this exercise of royal clemency being apparently the only means of securing the return of the painter to Madrid—and died in the same year in the fullness of her exquisite and inspiring beauty.

The period of Goya’s greatest popularity (1780-1800) was the period of his greatest activity. He was high in the favour of the Court. Much of his time was absorbed in painting portraits of his royal and aristocratic patrons. At the same time he never lost touch with the commonalty, nor his powers to depict, with sympathy and understanding, the life of the country—the bustling, laughing, loving, wrangling, vibrating life he loved and to which, by birth and temperament, he belonged. It is probable that he was never a courtier at heart. His effrontery and uncompromising independence, combined with incisive wit and physical strength, made him at once a singular and incongruous but popular figure in the Court circles, while his frank camaraderie and his amazing prowess in the national games and feats of strength, and above all, the boldness and skill of his demeanour in the bull-ring—in which he is said to have been the equal of the professional espada—won for him the enthusiastic admiration of the hero-worshipping people of Madrid. He seems to have been at no pains to disguise the real bent of his nature. The story runs that he would frequently leave the royal palace to pass the night in the most disreputable taverns and bodegas in the suburbs of Madrid, drinking, dicing, and merrymaking with the night-birds of the capital.