FRANCISCO GOYA Y LUCIENTES
By CHARLES H. CAFFIN
Author of “The Story of Spanish Painting,” “Old Spanish
Masters, Engraved by Timothy Cole,” etc., etc.
THE phenomenon of Goya is among the curiosities of the history of art. For in the latter half of the eighteenth century, when, under the feeble Bourbon dynasty, Spain had reached the lowest ebb of her national and artistic life, an artist arose who represented more than any other her racial characteristics and was destined to exert a world-wide influence on the art of the succeeding century.
While the rest of Europe was seething with the spirit of revolution, Goya, the man, was already in revolt, and at the same time had discovered for himself a revolutionary form of art, which anticipated by half a century the consciousness elsewhere of the need of a new method to fit the new point of view. In a word, he drove an entering wedge into the contemporary classicalism that was based upon a dry imitation of Roman marbles and Raphaelesque compositions, restored nature to art, and adapted his vision of nature to the spirit of inquiry, observation, and research that was in process of fermentation. Finally, he adjusted to his vision of life a method of composition, freer and more flexible than the older ones: that was preoccupied less with the representation of form than with the expression of movement and character; its aim, in fact, being primarily expressional. Thus he anticipated the motive of modern impressionism and determined in advance the methods of rendering it.
No less remarkable is the degree in which he was an avatar of the mingled traits of his race. For ethnologically the Spaniard is a Celt, who first was disciplined by Roman civilization, then merged in the flood of a Germanic wave, and later infused with the blood and culture of the Arab and the Moor. A truly wonderful amalgam—the ironic humor of the Celt; the mysticism, vigor, and grotesque imagination of the forest-bred Goth; the subtle inventiveness, sensuousness, and abstraction of the Orient, and the uncouth strain of the Black Man, whom to-day we are discovering to be the flotsam of a far-off submerged civilization in Darkest Africa. All these traits are recognizable in the work of Goya that he did to please himself: namely, in his painted figure-subjects, other than portraits, and in his drawings and etchings.
* * * * *
Goya. Portrait of Goya, drawn and etched by himself
Size of the original etching, 5⁵⁄₁₆ × 4⅞ inches