From “Los Capriccios.”From “Los Capriccios.”
GOYA.SOPLONES.GOYA.SE REPULEN.

Goya was far too great a sceptic to put a religious sentiment into matters in which he no longer believed; his talent was far too modern for the religious abstraction to be able to seize him. His “Christ on the Cross,” therefore, in the Museo del Prado, is simply tedious, a bad academical study. His frescoes in San Antonio de la Florida, at Madrid, exhibit a pretty, decorative motive—considerable movement, grace, and spirit. But amongst them are angels who sit there most irreverently, and, with a laugh of challenge, throw out their legs à la Tiepolo. The chief picture represents St. Antony of Padua raising a man from the dead. But all that interested him in it were the lookers-on. On a balustrade all around he has brought in the lovely, dainty faces of numerous ladies of the court, his bonnes amies, who lean their elbows on the balcony and coquette with the people down below. Their plump, round, white hands play meaningly with their fans; a thick cluster of ringlets waves over their bared shoulders; their sensual eyes languish with a seductive fire; a faint smile plays round their voluptuous lips. Several seem only just to have left their beds, and their vari-coloured, gleaming silks are crumpled. One is just arranging her coiffure, which has come undone and falls over her rosy bosom; another, with a languishing unconsciousness and a careless attitude, is opening her sleeve, whose soft, deep folds expose a snow-white arm. There is much chic in this Church picture. One very immodest angel is supposed to be the portrait of the Duchess of Alba, who was famed for her numerous intrigues.

In his portraits, too, he is unequal. He became the fashionable painter at the court. The politicians, poets, scholars, great ladies, actresses, all the famous folk of his epoch, sat to him. He daubed more than two hundred portraits; but they were good only when the subject amused him. His portraits of the Royal Family have something vicious and plebeian. He is too little in earnest, too little of an official, to paint court pictures. One might imagine that he with difficulty restrained himself from laughing at the pompous futility which stood before him. It irritated him to be obliged to paint these great lords and ladies in poses so ceremonial, instead of making them, like the angels of San Antonio, throw up their legs and skip over parapets. The Queen, Marie Louise, is frankly grotesque; and the family of Charles IV look like the family of a shopkeeper who have won the big prize in a lottery, and been photographed in their Sunday clothes. But, ah! when something gives him pleasure! In the Exhibition of Portraits at Paris, in 1885, there was the portrait of a young man, dressed in gray, which excelled Gainsborough for grace. With what a noble nonchalance this young elegant stands there, reminding one, in attitude and costume, of the incroyables of Charles Vernet. With what equanimity does he look out on life, in his satisfaction at the good fit of his clothes. The wonderful harmony of the grey tones was rendered with all Gainsborough’s delicacy. The same man who in those pictures of ceremony let himself go in a manner so brusque and frenzied, here revelled, a very Proteus in his chameleon-like qualities, in soft and mellow and seductive tones. One might say that he has thought here of Prudhon and Greuze, and joined their study to the cult of Velasquez.

From “Los Capriccios.”From “Los Capriccios.”
GOYA.QUE PICO DE ORO!GOYA.VOLAVERUNT.

Still more charming was he in his pictures of young girls, when he was himself fascinated by the attractions of his subjects. The infantile Donna Maria Josefa (at the Prado) and the twelve-year-old Queen Isabella of Sicily (at Seville) are admirable pictures. In them the candour and grace of budding youth, the whole poetry of young maidenhood, have won life and expression from the enamoured tenderness of an artist hand. Seduced by beauty, he renounced all irony, thought only of those big, wide-opened eyes of velvet, those rosy young lips; of that warm carnation and the elegant slimness of that soft young neck that rose in delicate contour from the shoulders. Or again, that marvellous double portrait of La Maja in the Academy of San Fernando: a young girl painted once clothed and once nude, both pictures in exactly the same pose, and both flooded with the same extraordinary sensuous charm. This is not the uncertain, sarcastic painter of those State pictures. It is an attentive observer, who depicts with sensitive devotion the harmonious lines of the irradiating, young, human body so worthy of celebration. The transparent stuff that covers the body of “La Maja clothed” reveals all that it hides; in the other picture the unveiled nudity sings the high pæan of the flesh. The drawing is sure, the modelling of a marvellous tenderness. The heaving bosom, the slender limbs, the tantalising eyes—every part of that nervous body, with its ivory whiteness, stretched out on the milk-white couch made for love, breathes of pleasure and voluptuousness.

In pictures of this kind Goya is wholly one of us. Grown independent of every traditional rule, he abandoned himself entirely to his own impressions, and produced enduring works, vibrating with life, because he was himself fascinated with nature. He showed here an idea of modernity that almost makes him seem a contemporary of our own—that zeal for the pictorial, for colour and light, which attracts us so much to-day. Very characteristic also of the changed aspect of the age are his designs for the famous tapestry in Santa Barbara, with which he made his début at Madrid. They are very crude in decoration. Two or three neat young girls, with big, black, moist eyes, here and there pleasing details—a couple of men carrying a wounded companion—are unable to gloss over the heaviness of the composition and colour. But it was of great consequence that Goya should have had courage for so bold a step as to make use of character scenes in decorative painting at a time when everywhere else, without exception, fêtes champêtres predominated.

In his oil paintings he went much further in this direction. In that impetuous manner peculiar to him he endeavoured to get a firm grip on the pictorial side of Spanish life, at home and in the streets, wherever he found it. The most fearful subjects—such as the two great slaughter scenes in the French invasion, painted with such breadth and fierceness—alternate with incidents of the liveliest character. Everything is jotted down, under the immediate influence of what has been observed, by rapid methods, and on this account produces an effect of sketches taken with complete directness from nature. In those careless pictures, swept with large strokes of the brush, there rises before us the mad drama of public holiday in the streets and in the circus: processions, bull-fights, brigands, the victims of the plague, assassinations, scenes of gallantry, national types—all observed with the acuteness of a Menzel. The Majas on the balcony in the Montpensier Gallery, the “Breakfast on the Grass,” the “Flower Girl,” the “Reaper,” the “Return from Market,” the “Cart attacked by Brigands,” are the most piquant, vividly coloured of these pictures. The “Romeria de San Isidoro” is full of such a sparkling, stirring life as the most modern of the impressionists alone have learned again to paint. A few dashes of colour, a few well-placed, bold strokes of the brush, and at once one sees the procession move, the groups passing each other by just as, in the marvellous sketches of the funeral of Sardina, in the Academy of San Fernando, one can see the young couples revolve madly in the dance, and the lances of the bull-fighters redden the sand of the arena.

The superabundance of such phantasy could not, of course, be achieved by the tardy brush. He required a quicker medium, that would permit him to express everything. Therefore he executed his numerous etchings, by which he was rendered famous, before people had learnt to appreciate him as a painter: the “Capriccios,” the “Malheurs de la Guerre,” the “Bull-fights,” the “Captives”—those marvellous and fantastic pages in which he expressed everything that his feverish, satirical soul had accumulated for contempt, and hatred, and anger, and scorn. The etcher’s needle was the poisoned dagger with which he attacked all that he wished to attack: tyranny, superstition, intrigue, adultery, honour that is sold and beauty that lets itself be bought, the arrogance of the great and the degrading servility of the little. He made an awful and jovial hecatomb of all the vices and the scandals of the age. Whomsoever he pilloried was laid bare in all respects; physically and morally, no single trait of him was forgotten. And he did it so wittily that he compelled even the offended person to laugh. Neither Charles IV himself, nor the Court, nor the Inquisition, which bled most beneath his thrusts, dared to complain.

From “Los Capriccios.”From “Los Capriccios.”
GOYA.QUIEN LO CREYERA!GOYA.LINDA MAESTRA!