Goya, an account of his life and works

by Albert Frederick Calvert

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.