_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_.