Goya, an account of his life and works

by Albert Frederick Calvert

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.