All these portraits are admirably conceived, in a simple, natural form, without superfluous details, and they are freely painted, in a rich and solid colouring, and stand out from the canvas, substantial, harmonious, pulsing with life, against those vaporous and imponderable backgrounds of which, since Velazquez, Goya alone has found the secret.
At this epoch Goya was not only a celebrated painter, he was also a man of fashion, mingling with persons of the highest rank. The Infante Don Luis kept him throughout entire seasons at his palace of Arenas de San Pedro, in the province of Avila, and it was there that Goya executed an entire series of magnificent portraits and genre paintings which belong to-day to the Counts of Chinchón. “Then there are the Benaventes, Dukes of Ossuna and of Candia, who for a period of more than ten years ordered work after work from him, at one time religious compositions, destined for the cathedral at Valencia, such as St. Francis of Barja bidding Farewell to his Family and St. Francis exhorting an Impenitent Dying Man, celebrated pictures which have been reproduced by the engraver Peleguer,—at other times portraits of the family, and lastly, a series of twenty-seven genre pictures for their Alameda in the environs of Madrid.”
Idyllic and anecdotic scenes play by far the larger part in these compositions. There is an Al Fresco Breakfast, in the midst of a delightful landscape, a Dance beside the Water, a Hunter showing his Family the Game that he has Killed, a Harvesting the Hay, a Resting from Labour, a Greased Pole, a Comical Accident at a Picnic, a Winter Landscape, The Seasons, Workmen constructing a Building, Highwaymen attacking a Stage-coach, Gypsies playing at See-saw, Bulls in the Arroyo, and lastly some of those inexplicable “caprices,” bizarre fantasies in which Goya mingles sorcerers and horned demons with members of the Inquisition.
Goya frequently introduced Inquisitors into his scenes; he had felt their claws early in life and had borne them a grudge ever since.
The most important and most celebrated canvas in this collection is The Romeria of San Isidro. This is the great festival in honour of the patron saint of Madrid. “The whole populace has come to make merry on the banks of the Manzanares, and the vast meadow which stretches from the hill-top where the saint’s hermitage stands, down to the very water’s edge, is covered by an immense throng, motley and variegated, pressing and crowding around the tents of the acrobats, the vendors’ booths, the open-air kitchens, and wine-shops. All this picturesque world is divided into a thousand varied groups; here a circle has been formed around a man strumming on a guitar; over yonder a merry set is forming; there is quarrelling, dancing, drinking; there are meetings and partings, and in the midst of all this swarming multitude we watch the coming and going of pages, troopers, porters, members of the body-guard in their red coats, amidst an indescribable pell-mell of carriages with gaily decked steeds, and of calesinos with bodies painted in atrocious colours, which are overturned by the restive mules as they break away. In the foreground, dominating the whole scene, pretty women shading themselves under pink silk parasols, and well garbed personages grouped in easy and unaffected attitudes, form a most ingenious and charming framework for the scenes which are being enacted at their feet. In the background of the picture, above and beyond the Manzanares, we see the palace with its terraced gardens and the city with its towers and domes. Here are San Francisco el Grande and the Cuesta de la Vega, and yonder is the famous Barrio de Lavapiés.”
Treated in a warm and luminous scale of colour, lustrous with subtle and vivid tones, this sparkling page remains unsurpassed, because of the infinite care which Goya expended in order to give variety and an astonishing degree of precision to even the minutest of its multifold details.
The pictures of country life, such as the Al Fresco Breakfast, The See-saw, The Dance, The Picnic, show us Goya under still another aspect. The first time that one sees these pictures in the Alameda one would say that they were the product of the brush of some one of the French painters of the eighteenth century; one is tempted to attribute them to Watteau or Fragonard; and it is true that Goya chose, like them, to reproduce the fashions and frivolities of his time; but even while he imitated the vanities and affectations of these masters, he remained nevertheless a Spaniard, and his types and his costumes are represented with the most scrupulous truth.
PLATE VII.—LA TIRANA
(Museum of the Prado, Madrid)