A CENTURY OF PAINTING.
NOTES DESCRIPTIVE AND CRITICAL.—GOYA AND HIS CAREER.—FOUR ENGLISH PAINTERS OF FAMILIAR LIFE.—GÉRICAULT, INGRES, AND DELACROIX.
By Will H. Low.
OOKING backward to the first quarter of this century, it is hardly too sweeping an assertion to say that, with a single exception, there was little that was important in the way of painting outside of France and England. There were local reputations in all the other countries, practitioners of the art who joined to a respectable proficiency in painting an adhesion to the traditions which had been handed down to them. These men, in their time and place, were notable; and in the museums of their respective countries their works remain of chronological interest to students of painting. But to the larger public which these papers address, they are of little importance, having exercised but slight influence on contemporaneous art.
The exception already noted was in Spain, and there only in the case of a single painter. Francisco Goya y Lucientes, "Pintor Español," as he delighted to call himself, would be, indeed has been, a fascinating subject for picturesque biography. Charles Yriarte, the well-known French art critic, has given the world a most interesting and complete story of Goya's life, which, though it is only separated from our own day by a span of seventy years, chronicles the exploits of one who in the history of art must hark back to Benvenuto Cellini in the sixteenth century to find his parallel.
Goya was born March 31, 1746, at Fuente de Todos, in the province of Aragon. The son of a small farmer, he was placed when very young in the local Academy of Fine Arts at Saragossa, where he received instruction from Bayen and Luzan, painters little known outside of Spain. The swashbuckler instincts which were to govern him through life manifested themselves here, where in a street brawl he laid low three of his adversaries. He found it prudent to evade both justice and the vengeance which followed swift and sure in those days in Spain, by flying to Madrid. Soon after his arrival in the capital, however, in continuation of his old mode of life, he was picked up for dead in one of the low quarters of the town. Surviving the poignard, but again threatened with arrest, he joined a quadrilla of bull-fighters, in whose company he went from town to town, giving exhibitions of his prowess in the national sport.
THE GARROTED MAN. FROM AN ETCHING BY GOYA.
There is a tradition that this etching was made from nature, the model—some malefactor executed by the strangling method employed in Spain—being studied by Goya from his chamber window.