Looking 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.
[Illustration: 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.]
With all this, painting must have been somewhat of an interlude;
but Goya had early shown signs of great talent, and before he left
Saragossa, his master, Josepha Bayen, had confidence enough in
his future to entrust the happiness of his daughter to his care by
permitting his marriage to her. Goya's biographer notes that through
all the various adventures of his career he had the utmost care for
the material comfort of this lady. Her character must impress us
to-day as charitable to excess; for, shortly after the bull-fighting
episode, Goya found himself in Rome, where his next exploit was the
abduction, from a convent, of a noble Roman girl. With the police once
more on his track, he sought refuge at the Spanish Embassy, whence
he was despatched home in disguise, probably to the relief of his
country's representative in Rome. Before this adventure, which was
only one of many which the charitable wife had to pardon, he had
attracted the attention of David, who was then in Italy, and who,
as his art differed in every way from that of Goya, must have been
strongly impressed by his work to give it his approval.
[Illustration: DEATH ON THE BATTLE-FIELD. FROM AN ETCHING BY GOYA.
One of the plates from the "Disasters of War" where the grotesque and
huge figure of Death appears to the combatants.]
On arriving home Goya was given employment in designing a series of
tapestries for the royal palace; and from 1780, when he was made a
member of the Spanish Royal Academy, ensues the period of his
greatest artistic activity. Carrying into his art the same excess
of temperament which marked his life, his execution was rapid and
decisive. Rebellious to the ordinary means employed by painters, he
used various mediums, some of which have ill withstood the ravages of
time; and, disdaining brushes, he often employed sponges or bits of
rag in their place. In the case of one of his pictures, a revolt of
the Madrilenians against the French, it is said that he employed a
spoon.
In 1799 Goya was made painter to the king, Charles III., whose
successor, the fourth of his name, continued his favor. The time,
which was that of the notorious "Prince of Peace," Godoy, was
favorable for a character like that of Goya, whose eccentricities were
looked upon with an indulgent eye by a court which must have felt
that its function was hardly that of moral censor. At least Goya, the
intimate of Maria Louisa and the court circle, by no means abandoned
his friends the bull-fighters and tavern-keepers. Fresh from an
altar-piece for a cathedral, or a royal portrait, his ready brush
found employment in rapidly painting a street scene, or even a sign
for a wine-shop. A whitewashed wall for canvas and mud from the gutter
for pigment, were the means employed to embody a patriotic theme at
the entrance of the French soldiers into Madrid--a popular masterpiece
executed to the plaudits of the crowd.
All this would seem to denote a charlatan; yet withal, Goya has fairly
won his place amid the great painters of the world. Perhaps no better
example could be found of the essential difference between the outward
and visible actions of a man and the inward and spiritual grace of an
artist than in this instance; and the Latin standpoint, always more
intellectually liberal than our own Anglo-Saxon appreciation of the
same problem furnishes the reason why Goya was left free to pursue his
artistic career instead of languishing in prison. His illogical brush
filled the cathedrals of Saragossa, Seville, Toledo, and Valencia
with masterly frescoes, while with the etching needle he produced
many plates. Some of these, like the "Caprices," a series of eighty
etchings, are filled with imagination alternately tragical and
grotesque; while another series, representing bull-fights, throughout
its thirty-three plates depicts the incidents of the game with intense
realism. The "Disasters of War," another series of eighty, were
inspired by the French invasion; and never, perhaps, were the
cruelties of war more strenuously realized in art than in these.
Probably these etchings, executed, like all his works, by methods
peculiar to himself, constitute his best title to remembrance. But
his painting, replete though it be with the defects of his qualities,
stands as a precursor of the great coloristic school of which
Delacroix was the head and front. This is notably to be felt in his
portraits, and in some of the rapidly executed single figures of
which the Louvre has a specimen and the Metropolitan Museum, New York,
another--the latter, "A Jewess of Tangiers."
[Illustration: GOYA. FROM A PORTRAIT ETCHED BY HIMSELF.