The Story of Spanish Painting

by Charles H. Caffin

surprised that this view of art had no interest for him. We find him to have been from boyhood an eager liver, interested to the full in life; so we do not now share the surprise that his contemporaries must have felt when they saw these cartoons. To a society accustomed to an art of academic imitation and rococo lackadaisicalness, they may well have been a shock. They seem also to have come as a welcome relief, for they made Goya popular; moreover they established for him a character of being independent, of which he subsequently took full advantage.

The color schemes of these designs are noteworthy. While the Teniers tapestries are based on a very naive use of the primary colors, red, blue and yellow, and the Boucher on a subtle use of the same, in which the sharpness of the hues is silvered down to demi-tints, the Goya introduce the secondary colors. They involve the red, yellow and blue, but merely as flashes of brilliance in a groundwork of plum-color, purple, dull brown-red, deep orange and blue, and rich greens, enlivened with white and velvety black. The schemes are intricate, varied, and above all, positive; the work of an artist with an original, if still unmatured, sense of color. Goya, indeed, proclaimed in this early work the fact that he was a colorist; although, as yet, there is little suggestion of the kind of colorist he was going to prove himself.

Following these cartoons came several commissions to provide decorative paintings for churches. Goya executed them in the spirit of popular genre that inspired the cartoons. Not only had he no religious feeling; he was bitterly and openly opposed to the Church, and in these pictures of saintly legends was at no pains to simulate a reverence that he did not feel. To this period also belongs the Portrait of Charles III of the Prado, which shows him in the costume of a huntsman, an angular figure with a genial but homely face. It is painted with uncompromising naturalness; the contours as hard and bold as the coloring; a picture separated from the Goya that we later know by a wide gap. The fact seems to be that in this portrait Goya was painting simply what he saw; and since the original was a man of commonplace exterior and Goya himself viewed him in a perfectly commonplace way he produced this astonishingly common-looking picture. It was necessary for Goya to discover some refinement in his own point of view, before he could develop his best artistic possibilities. The gradual steps by which he reached this goal I do not profess to know; but a few years later, when he had been established as Court painter to the new king, Charles IV, the true Goya is discovered. His new style, the result of a new way of viewing his subject, is fully developed in the group portrait of Charles IV and the Royal Family.

We will postpone consideration of Goya’s mental attitude toward these royal puppets. That is part of his general outlook upon life, as a satirist and castigator of follies. It is his attitude toward his art which concerns us for the moment. The reproduction of this picture (p. 171) gives little but a limited idea of its artistic beauty, but it brings out the lack of human interest in, at least, the principal personages and the necessary stiffness of this arrangement of the figures. It will be noticed, however, that Goya has drawn the straggling items into some degree of unity by enveloping the lower part of the end groups in half-shadow. The eye is thus led to concentrate on the center of the composition. Here for an instant our attention may be occupied by the ungainly attitude of the Queen, and the forbidding expression of her face, turned, as in her other portraits by Goya, in one direction, while her eyes seek another. But it is only for an instant. Then we are attracted by the jewels in her dark hair and on her bosom, and by the exquisiteness of the costume—a fall of Chinese silk, mandarin blue, embroidered in white and gold, over a white lace skirt. Next our gaze may wander to the similar dresses worn by the princesses on her right, which however represent subtle variations of effect through the more or less of shadow in which they are veiled; and then to the king’s rose-embroidered vest, the pale blue and white watered silk ribbon, and the stars and jewels which cluster on the plum-colored velvet coat. So gradually one becomes conscious of the loveliness of color that permeates the whole group, a bouquet of mingled quietude and brilliance, of low tones and sparkling keys, which one can enjoy with as complete a detachment from any thought of the figures, as if they were a parterre of flowers.

In fact, there is revealed here a colorist of extraordinary refinement and subtlety; and of an imagination that is rare among painters. Goya’s original fondness for varied and positive colors has matured into a mastery over a few hues, treated with exquisite nuances. And the secret of this marvelous color-expression is the artist’s new way of looking at his subject. He has become an impressionist in the modern sense. He stands forth, indeed, as the first of modern impressionists, the forerunner by nearly a hundred years of the principal art-motive of the nineteenth century.

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Goya used to say that his only teachers had been Velasquez, Rembrandt and Nature. It was from the first named that he learned to paint, not the subject in front of him but the impression he had formed of it; and in this he may have been assisted by Rembrandt’s use of chiaroscuro to eliminate by shadow the unessentials and to heighten the saliencies by light. Yet it is difficult to understand how Goya could have had many opportunities of studying Rembrandt, since there is only a single example in the Prado, and the Dutch masters were not favored in Spain. Accordingly one is disposed to give Goya fuller credit for discovering his own way of rendering his impressions. As it is exhibited in this portrait group, it reveals an imagination that heightens the suggestion of beauty in the thing recorded, and an extraordinary gift of improvisation in handling passages of intricate detail and rendering the effect of an ensemble. There is no such maze of luxuriant loveliness as this in any picture by Velasquez; the nearest approach to it being, perhaps, the breast of the little Don Carlos on horseback. The Goya represents a more feminine sensitiveness; it is impregnated with temperament. This is the quality of Goya’s impressionism which makes it modern. Velasquez’s is impersonally objective; modern impressionism, like Goya’s, is naturalism viewed through temperament; it shapes and colors the record to the artist’s mood.

This is at once its weakness and its strength; a source of power when the mood is high and spontaneous, of weakness when the mood is slack or directly unsympathetic. Under the latter conditions Goya not infrequently turned out pictures in which spontaneity and imagination are absent, and the result is wooden, ineffective. Still oftener his faces are lacking in expression and in subtlety of modeling; while his hands, though one has heard them praised, are seldom expressive in modeling or in gesture. It was the tout-ensemble that interested him and in this the costumes play a very important part and are usually handled with incomparable mastery.

Two beautiful examples of his ability to encompass the spirit of a subject are the pair of canvases, representing a Maia, or girl of the people, in the one case nude, in the other clothed. In both the sofa is upholstered in green velvet, spread with silvery white draperies and cushions. But, in the case of the nude, the green is cool and bluish; in the other, a warmer apple-green to harmonise with the costume. The latter consists of a bolero jacket of mustard color with black and white lace trimmings, a white gown, shaded with tones of dove-grey and lavender, a sash of silvery hue, suffused with claret, and yellow Turkish slippers. The black network is laid on crisply and roughly, thus helping to set off the smoothness of the technique in the face, which has warm red cheeks and brown eyes. On the other hand, in the Maia Nude, the coloring throughout is cooler; a more delicate rose in the face, a faintly oxidised silver shadow under the chin and over the bosom; and similar shadows of inexpressible subtlety over other portions of the body. The flesh is cream with the faintest suggestion of rose; and yet not cream, for it seems to be veritable flesh. But, although this nude is painted with a naturalism that could scarcely be exceeded, the web of evanescent shadow in which it is clothed invests the nudity with a veil of idealism. These shadows, absolutely indescribable in their delicacy, are the result of a most perfect sense of values and of a technique as sure as it is facile. They are the despair of painters who try to copy the picture. Goya, in fact, in these two canvases, particularly in the nude, has caught the volatile essence of young femininity; has succeeded, as it were, in painting the fragrance of the flower.

Another kind of femininity, more matured, he has represented in the Andalusian beauty, Doña Isabel Corbo de Porcel, of the National Gallery. Here the technique, as befits the impression, is more brusque and vivacious. But in another example in the same Gallery, Portrait of Dr. Péral, Goya has adapted to the refinement of his subject a color-scheme and technique of unsurpassable delicacy. The features, pale pink, shaded with grey, are set in a frame of long whitish yellow hair; the coat is greyish drab, the vest pearly grey with green sprigs, the figure being placed against a dark olive-black background. The expression of the whole is of a man of rare cultivation and fine mental poise. The scheme of color recalls the Portrait of Francisco Bayeu, in the Prado, except that, in the latter, silvery blue is substituted for the green; this note of color appearing in the sash.