1469. STILL LIFE.
W. K. Heda (Dutch: 1594-1678)
One of the painters "of the kitchen and dining-room—painters who devoted themselves to painting copper and silver vessels, pottery, and porcelain, modest saucepans, crystal cups, glass bowls, and goblets of chased silver. The first to cultivate this new style of still life was Willem Klaasz Heda. He was born at Haarlem. He was a clever and careful painter, and must have left behind him a considerable number of works; but, nevertheless, his pictures are excessively rare. They generally consist of a carved silver cup, a plate, and a cut lemon—three subjects which the painter rendered with marvellous truthfulness, the whole surrounded by a few accessories rising out of a brown background" (Havard: The Dutch School, p. 272).
1470. A BATTLE SCENE.
J. Weier (German: 17th Century).
This picture is signed I. Weier, and dated 1645. It may be either by Jacob Weier, of Hamburg, who died in 1670; or by Johann Matthias Weier, of the same town, who was a pupil of Wouwerman, and died, a very old man, in 1690.
1471. THE PICNIC ("MARIENDA CAMPESTRE").
Francisco Goya (Spanish: 1746-1828).
This painter—of greater genius and of a more national spirit, says Sir William Stirling-Maxwell, than any his century produced—was the son of humble parents. Until the age of 16 he lived without any knowledge of art, when his passion for painting was awakened by a monk of Santa Fé, near Saragossa, after which he was admitted into the studio of José Luxan Martinez, who had been educated in Italy. He distinguished himself at this time, not so much in the studio as in the streets, in the quarrels of painters and confraternities, sometimes ending in bloodshed. At Madrid, to which city he afterwards escaped, his mode of life appears to have been anything but that of an orderly citizen. Being a good musician, and gifted with a voice, he sallied forth nightly, serenading the caged beauties of the capital, with whom he seems to have been a general favourite, and whose portraits he painted. In consequence of a street brawl in Madrid he fled to Italy, in company with a party of bull-fighters, and resided at Rome, where he fraternised with Louis David. In 1774 he returned to Spain, married, and settled down to his profession. He soon attracted the notice of Mengs, the King's painter, by some designs which he executed for the royal manufactory of tapestry, and became a popular artist of that capital, and a prime favourite with its fashionable society. In 1789 he was appointed painter-in-ordinary to Charles IV., a post which he continued to hold under Ferdinand VII. He was so largely employed that he was able to maintain a fine villa near Madrid, where he entertained in the grand style. Among distinguished persons who sat to him was the Duke of Wellington, but on his making a remark which raised the artist's choler, Goya seized a plaster cast and hurled it at the Duke's head. The artist's declining years were spent in retirement at Bordeaux, where he died at the age of 82.
"Goya's earlier life indicated," says W. B. Scott, "the character of his painting—bizarre and wild, with a gleam of infernal splendour in his choice of beauty. He was an inventor, and gives us the most vivid and novel sensations, although he serves us with vinegar as well as wine." "Much that was bizarre and tumultuous, the strangeness of charm, a certain curious and sombre side of beauty, the sense of the strength of a personality, the reflection of extravagant gaiety, or excessive horror, Goya was able to render in a manner that had never been seen before" (Goya, by W. Rothenstein: 1900). He was in no way the slave to the technicalities of the studio or academical rules. In sacred subjects, which he painted by no means con amore, he affects the hard style of David and his French followers. But it was otherwise in those more congenial works in which his hand spoke as his fancy prompted, and in which he poured forth the gaiety of his art or the gall of his sarcasm. There the daubing boldness of the execution rivals the coarseness of the idea or the rudeness of the jest. His colours were laid on as often with sticks, sponges, or dish-clouts as with the brush. "Smearing his canvas with paint," says Gautier of him, "as a mason plasters a wall, he would add the delicate touches of sentiment with a dash of his thumb." So dexterous was he in turning all materials to artistic account that during morning visits to his friends he would take the sandbox from the inkstand, and, strewing the contents on the table, amuse them with caricatures traced in an instant by his ready finger. His versatility is proverbial; in addition to numerous oil paintings he executed many crayon sketches, engravings, and etchings. It is by the latter that he is perhaps best known. "The Caprices" are the most surprising, showing humanity in all the stages of brutality and ugliness, with a mélange of beauty and demonology quite unexampled. (W.B. Scott, The Spanish School; Bryan's Dictionary of Painters; and Stirling-Maxwell, Annals of the Artists of Spain.) The three following pictures are representative of Goya's several styles—scenes of country life, demoniacal fancies, and portraiture.
From the collection of the Duke of Ossuna at Madrid. Théophile Gautier described Goya—in the language of hyperbole—as "a combination of Watteau and Rembrandt," and in this picture we have a Watteau-like subject, treated, however, in a more grotesque fashion than that of the charming French painter of rural fêtes.