A wonderful chance ordained that, in the province of art, the most powerful figure of that storm and tumult, the one artist of the age of the race of Prometheus, to which belonged the young Goethe and the young Schiller, should be born in the most mediæval country in Europe, on Spanish soil. Against an art that was more catholic than catholicism, courtly and mystical, there came by far the greatest reaction in Goya. From Roelas, Collantes, and Murillo to him there is hardly any transition.

Francisco Goya preached Nihilism in the home of belief. He denied everything, believed nothing, doubted of everything, even of that peace and liberty which he hoped to be at hand. That old Spanish art of religion and dogma was changed under his hands to an art of negation and sarcasm. His attitude is not that of an insolent and impetuous youth, who puts out his tongue at the Academy and strikes with audacious hand at the academicians’ high powdered perruques; it is the attitude of the modern spirit, which begins by doubting all things which have been honoured hitherto. His Church pictures are devoid of religious feeling, and his etchings replete with sneers at everything which was previously esteemed as authority. He scoffs at the clerical classes and the religious orders, laughs at the priestly raiment which covered the passions of humanity. Spanish art, which began in a blind piety, becomes in Goya revolutionary, free, modern.

Laurent, photo.
GOYA.THE MAJA CLOTHED.

Goya is, in his whole nature, a modern man, a restless, feverish soul; nervous as a décadent; temperament to his finger-tips. His style in portraiture, his art of composition, his whole method,—all speak to our artists to-day in a language easily understood, and on many of them the influence of Goya is unmistakable. He is one of the most fascinating figures of the beginning of the century. As audacious as he was clever, as versatile as he was fantastic, a keen observer as well as a strong creative spirit, he fascinates and astonishes in his pictures, just as in his wonderful etchings, by a remarkable mixture of the bizarre and the original. His pictures, whether they be violent or eccentric, tender or hard, gloomy or joyous, nearly always move and palpitate with life itself, and they will always keep their attraction. There is no one of Goya’s pictures, not even the flimsiest sketch, at which one can look coldly.

He was born in a village in the province of Aragon, the son of a small landed proprietor, in 1746. At the age of fourteen, having already painted frescoes in the church of his native-place, he went to Saragossa as an apprentice; and there he showed himself to be vivacious and passionate, and soon became the champion among his comrades in all their pastimes and brawls. Restless, and always thinking of adventure, he refused every regular kind of education, disarranged everything in his master’s studio, worked when he could, drew his sword when he had a mind to, nourished in his head dark thoughts on liberty, came and went and loved, dallied with his knife, snapped his fingers at the Inquisition, which was after him, and fled from Madrid,—such was he at twenty, and such he remained all his life.

Laurent, photo.
GOYA.THE MAJA NUDE.
GOYA.   DE QUE MAL MORIRA.
From “Los Capriccios.”

Italy, whither he fled on account of a duel, did not alter him. There were new love quarrels. He fought, stabbed a rival, was wounded himself, amused himself extremely, studied little, observed, admired, but neither painted nor copied anything. It was thanks to this indolence that the great past did not take him prisoner. He did not know much, but for what he knew he could thank himself. He loved the old painters, but platonically; their works did not lead him astray. In this lies the explanation of his qualities and his faults: that marvellous mixture of seductive grace and visible weakness, of subtlety and brutality, of refinement and ignorance. He merits equally sympathy and blame, is as genial as he is unequal. But one would not wish him to be otherwise: if there had been more order and proportion in his works his good qualities would have been lost. He would have suffered in spontaneity, vivacity, originality, and quietly taken his anchorage in the sleepy haven of mediocrity. As he is, he is wholly the child of his country: from head to foot a Spaniard of the eighteenth century, a son of that downfallen Spain that was dying from loss of blood. For hundreds of years a black cloud, extinguishing all joy, had hung over Spanish life, a cloud out of which, only here and there in dismal lightning flashes, there emerged obscure figures of sombre despots, sick ascetics, and silent martyrs. All mundane inclinations were suppressed, all sensuous desires prohibited. Men spent their nights with their eyes fixed upon the gory histories and passionate exhortations of the Old Testament, hearing in imagination the menacing, thunderous voice of a dreadful God, until at last in their own hearts the fanatical inspiration of the prophetic seer awoke anew, and their feverish forms were torn asunder by ecstatic visions and religious hallucinations. When Goya began his career the sinister country of the Inquisition had grown frivolous. A breath of revolution was passing over men’s minds. An intoxicating odour of mundane voluptuousness penetrated everywhere, even into the convents themselves; the figures of the French Rococo Olympus had brought confusion into the Christian paradise. Spain no longer believed; it laughed at the Inquisition, trembled no more when it was threatened with the pains of Hell. It had grown frivolous, wanton, epicurean, full of grace and laughter. The rosy-red and blue shepherds of the Trianon had made an entry into the sombre Court of Aranjuez. Literature, taste, and art were infected by French influences, Parisian sparks of wit, lightning esprit, and Parisian immorality; and the same rumbling earthquake which wrecked the throne of France was soon to shatter that of Spain. In Goya’s works there is a refulgence of all this. But, like every great artist, he is not only the expression of his epoch, but also its leader; he almost anticipates the age which shall succeed it. Like a figure of Janus, on the border-line between two centuries, standing in a manner between two worlds, he was the last of the old masters and the first of the moderns—even in that special sense in which we employ the word to-day.

Through a commission to design cartoons for the Spanish manufactories of tapestry, he was brought into contact with the Court. Member of the Academy of San Fernando in 1780, Pintor del Rey, with an income of 12,500 francs in 1786, he became soon afterwards the Director of the Madrid Academy—the drollest Director of an Academy that man can imagine! Goya, the peasant youth, with his bull neck and matador-like strength, lived at the Spanish Court in the midst of the enervated scions of a dissolute aristocracy, who, with their sickly and anæmic features, indolent and impotent, skulked through life, young men prematurely old. Naturally he was the idol of the women, hated by the courtiers on account of his caustic wit, a terror to all husbands because of his perpetual intrigues, and at the same time feared as the best swordsman in Madrid, who drew his rapier with the indifference with which we light a cigarette.

It is only as the outcome of such a personality that his works are to be understood.