Goya, an account of his life and works

by Albert Frederick Calvert

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.’