was usual in Spain, he experienced much difficulty in obtaining payment
for his work. In April 1785 we find Goya, Farro, and Castillo
memorialising the Conde de Florida Blanca for pecuniary acknowledgment
of their labours, explaining that they had each spent two years in
making sketches and studies and in the execution of their several
pictures, and pointing out that they are obliged to gain their
livelihood with their work and ‘have no income or assistance, like
others who have the good fortune to serve his Majesty.’ This memorial
was despatched with a covering letter from Antonio Ponz, who emphasises
the fact that the painters are in need, and hopes that their request
will be complied with, ‘in order that these poor men may not lose heart
and that reward shall hearten them to fresh work.’ Three months late
Florida Blanca arranged with the general directors at the post-office to
hand the artists ‘six thousand reals for the present until something
else is arranged.’ This payment is duly noted on the memorial, and a
later marginal order, presumably in the Count’s handwriting, reads: ‘Pay
another 4000 reals to each, although the pictures are nothing wonderful,
but theirs are the best.’ This grudging eulogy was in striking contrast
with the enthusiastic praise bestowed upon Goya’s pictures for the
Salamanca College by the Consejo de las Ordenes, who instructed
Jove-Llanos to assure the artist that he was ‘singularly satisfied with
the care and diligence with which he had finished the paintings and with
their eminent merit.’
In the year of his return to Madrid Goya’s father died, and the painter
sent for his mother and his brother Camilo to join him. He obtained for
Camilo a chaplainship at Chinchón, but his mother soon wearied of the
unaccustomed noise and bustle of the city and retired to Zaragoza, where
she lived on a pension of five reals per diem provided by Goya. The
artist at this time may have found some difficulty in providing for his
household; for his family, if not long-lived, was numerous, but it is
unlikely that he ever felt the pinch of poverty. We can well believe
that he was insistent in obtaining the reward of his labours, especially
when he was working for princes who, in his view, were living a life of
gilded pauperism, and the stress which Ponz lays upon the needs of these
‘poor men’ is far removed from the attitude assumed by Goya. In the
letter, in which he applies for payment, he does not plead for a dole in
relief of his poverty, but demands the remuneration which is justly due
to him. This is the only recorded instance of his being in financial
straits. From this time his career is one of eventful and interrupted
but assured success. Fame and fortune attended him on either hand. In
1785 Andreas Calleja died, and Goya succeeded him as deputy director of
the Academy of San Fernando, with an annual salary of twenty-five
doubloons. Four years later, on the death of Cornelio van der Goten,
Charles IV., who had just succeeded his father Charles III., appointed
him a Painter of the Chamber, with a salary of 15,000 reals, which was
increased in 1799 to 50,000 reals a year, with the rank of first painter
to the King.
In this period of his greatest prosperity, Goya was courted not only for
the sake of his art, but also for his personal qualities. He was popular
with men, while women eagerly contended for his favour. A revolutionary,
he became the friend of the King, while the Queen and the Countess of
Benavente delighted in his companionship. He went from palace to palace
and from fête to fête, observing, working, studying, revelling in the
life by which he was surrounded and in which he played a full part. This
lover of freedom could breathe in an atmosphere of corruption; this son
of the soil could play the courtier with a will. ‘If we are to
understand his genius rightly,’ says C. Gasquoine Hartley, in _A Record
of Spanish Painting_, ‘all contradictions are solved when we realise
that he was an onlooker at, rather than an operator in, many incidents
of his life.’ This half-hearted attempt to condone the irregularity of
his life at this period is at variance both with what we know of Goya’s
temperament and with the facts. He was an actor as well as an
interpreter of the scenes which he represents, and many of his pictures,
which are regarded as biting satires of the follies and vice of his age,
are quite as plausibly explained as the expression of personal animus
and party feeling. Certain people have discovered in Goya a moralist
after the style of Hogarth, using his brush in the sacred cause of
morality, to expose the vices of his time, laying bare the baseness of
his contemporaries in order to inspire contempt and horror of their
conduct, stigmatising the habits of the court of Charles IV., and
castigating the hypocrisy, ignorance, and immodesty of the men and women
who surrounded the royal family. But while in the later works of his
mature age he employed his brush and needle to this purpose, it is more
probable, as Lafond concludes, that under Charles IV. and Maria Luisa,
Goya drew and engraved, as La Fontaine wrote his fables: for the
pleasure of producing them, from the necessity of multiplying them, not
troubling himself about questions of morality or of the lessons which
his pictures should teach. ‘The truth is,’ says his French biographer,
‘that, mixed up in the intrigues of the Court and involved in personal
quarrels, he takes the part now of one, now of another, using his pen to
scratch his adversaries of to-day who are his allies to-morrow.’ In all
his works he imbued the subject with the quality of his thought as well
as with the charm of his colour and the skill of his draughtmanship. Of
all the artists of his class, says the _Boletin de la Sociedad Española
de Excursiones_, none put into their studies more meaning and personal
opinion. If he painted a scene he attached to it a proverb or a
significant ejaculation; if he produced a portrait he left upon the
likeness his opinion of his model; if in many cases it amounted to a
positive caricature, he could no more help seeing his subject in that
guise than his subject could avoid so appearing to the artist.
With regard to Goya’s personal life at this period it is not necessary
to say much, but it would seem to have been consistent with our
knowledge of him and of his surroundings. Lafond reminds us that his
wife bore him twenty children and continued to love him in spite of his
endless infidelities. Mr. Rotherstein declares that while it would be
idle to pretend that he was faithful to his wife, it is undeniable that
he was deeply attached to her during her lifetime. With the single
exception of his devotion to the unfortunate Duchess of Alba, says the
same writer, his intrigues seem to have been as much caprices on the
part of his sitters as his own. But these caprices were, as it has been
said, endless. ‘We have only to look at the master’s self-portrait,’
writes Richard Muther, ‘at this man with the bull-neck and full, sensual
lips, to understand that the countless stories which got about on the
subject of his relations with the women of high society in Madrid were
not all inventions of the fancy. Goya must have been a terror to all
their husbands. In all the most aristocratic salons the women were at
his feet; and perhaps they appreciated the difference between this
sturdy man of the people and their decadent lords and masters. In a
word, Goya at this time not only painted Rococo, but lived himself to
its full the wild passionate life of that Rococo period.’ And again, in
the _Boletin de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones_, we get the shrewd
and common-sense conclusion that ‘Goya was a man of his age. He neither
aspired to the category of an ascetic nor opposed the customs and
tendencies of his time, and his age being one of transition, without
fixed principles, he accommodated himself to its duties and its
weaknesses, never for a moment failing in his domestic obligations, yet
not refusing those outside favours that presented themselves to him.’
It would have been strange indeed if Goya had resisted the temptations
by which he was surrounded; it is remarkable under the circumstances
that he remained unspoiled. The King, as we have seen, was his friend,
the Queen confided to him her most delicate secrets, the all-powerful
Prince de la Pax made him welcome at Aranjuez, and the most
distinguished women of the day delighted in entertaining him. Writing to
his friend Zapater about his success at this period, he said: ‘I had
established for myself an enviable mode of life; I no longer danced
attendance in an ante-chamber; if anybody wanted anything of mine he had
to come to me. I was much sought after, but if it was not anybody in a
high position, or to oblige a friend, I worked for none.’ He was a
privileged guest at the palaces of the Marchioness of Santa Cruz and of
San Carlos; Brunetti and the Countess of Benavente fêted him. His
relations with the beautiful and vivacious Duchess of Alba are too well
known to call for more than a passing mention. The artist painted at
least a dozen portraits of the Duchess, in one of which he presents
himself in company with his inamorata. He introduced her piquant
features into the frescoes of San Antonio de la Florida. She is the
model for the nude and clothed Maja which hang in the Prado Museum.
Tradition has it that the clothed Maja was painted to meet the wishes of
the Duke, who expressed a desire to inspect the master’s work. The story
is almost comical to any one who has stood in front of the two pictures.
Nothing but the most conventional views upon the subject of the nude
could make the naked study more offensive in the eyes of a husband than
the one in which the young woman, ‘naked in spite of her dress,’ appears
to challenge the continence of all the St. Anthonys of Christendom.
Of these pictures Mr. Charles Ricketts writes in an illuminating chapter
on _The Masterpieces of the Prado_: ‘Goya’s two pictures are still
vivacious and fresh. In “La Maja,” a nude, he has painted the sensuous
waist, the frail arms, the dainty head of the Duchess thrown upon
pillows, contrasting in their gray whiteness with the gleam upon her
flesh. In the other we note the same grace of pose, a more summary
workmanship, touches of colour--too many perhaps. The Duchess of Alba
(La Maja) reclines on her divan in her rich bolero and white duck
trousers of a toreador or Spanish dandy. We pause, we are astonished and
charmed; we wonder how such a thing was possible. Her beauty and daring
live on the two canvases; this one scandal in the nineteenth century has
endowed the world with those pictures, and they are now in the Prado. So
ends the adventure.’
The scandal which associated Goya’s name with that of the Duchess of
Alba, fanned, it may be suspected, by the jealousy of the Countess of
Benavente, could not be concealed, and by the order of Maria Luisa, the
Duchess was banished in 1795 to the seclusion of her estate at San
Lucar. The painter immediately obtained from the King a prolonged leave
of absence and accompanied her into exile. On the journey to San Lucar
an accident happened to their carriage, and Goya with his characteristic
energy set to work to repair the defect. An iron bar belonging to the
coach was buckled; a fire had to be lighted and the iron made straight.
The heat and the unwonted exertion which the operation entailed was
followed by a chill, and from this chill resulted the deafness which, in
later years, became complete. The Duchess was recalled in the following
year--this exercise of royal clemency being apparently the only means of
securing the return of the painter to Madrid--and died in the same year
in the fullness of her exquisite and inspiring beauty.
The period of Goya’s greatest popularity (1780-1800) was the period of
his greatest activity. He was high in the favour of the Court. Much of
his time was absorbed in painting portraits of his royal and
aristocratic patrons. At the same time he never lost touch with the
commonalty, nor his powers to depict, with sympathy and understanding,
the life of the country--the bustling, laughing, loving, wrangling,
vibrating life he loved and to which, by birth and temperament, he
belonged. It is probable that he was never a courtier at heart. His
effrontery and uncompromising independence, combined with incisive wit
and physical strength, made him at once a singular and incongruous but
popular figure in the Court circles, while his frank _camaraderie_ and
his amazing prowess in the national games and feats of strength, and
above all, the boldness and skill of his demeanour in the bull-ring--in
which he is said to have been the equal of the professional espada--won
for him the enthusiastic admiration of the hero-worshipping people of
Madrid. He seems to have been at no pains to disguise the real bent of
his nature. The story runs that he would frequently leave the royal
palace to pass the night in the most disreputable taverns and bodegas in
the suburbs of Madrid, drinking, dicing, and merrymaking with the
night-birds of the capital.
But Goya’s artistic output showed no signs of falling off either in
quality or amount, and his marvellous rapidity of workmanship enabled
him to produce an almost incredible number of canvases. In a biography
and review of this size and scope it is not possible to present a
leisured review of his pictures. We must be content with a brief notice
of the more important among them, but the illustrations at the end of
the volume which are produced in such wealth, and which constitute the
chief interest of this book, will speak more eloquently than words. Of
Goya’s methods of painting many stories are told, from which it might
be concluded that he employed for the purpose every instrument known to
art with the solitary exception of a brush. Gautier, who declared his
mode to be as eccentric as his talent, has exhausted all the facts and
legends relating to his brush-work (if so it can be called) in the
following vivacious descriptive passage: ‘He kept his colours in tubs,
and applied them to the canvas by means of sponges, brooms, rags, and
everything that happened to be within his reach. He put on his tones
with a trowel, as it were, exactly like so much mortar, and painted
touches of sentiment with large daubs of his thumb. From the fact of his
working in this offhand and expeditious manner, he would cover some
thirty feet of wall in a couple of days. This method certainly appears
somewhat to exceed even the licence accorded to the most impetuous and
fiery genius; the most dashing painters are but children compared to
him. He executed, with a spoon for a brush, a painting of the “Dos de
Mayo,” where some French troops are shooting a number of Spaniards. It
is a work of incredible vigour and fire.’
The vigour and fire which Gautier finds in this picture is to be
observed in varying degree in all Goya’s works. These qualities were
the results of his temperament, which moved him to fling his ideas upon
the canvas before they could escape him, and imbued him with a constant
desire to be rid of them and at work on something else. ‘His whole art,’
says Muther, ‘seems like a bull-fight; for everywhere he sees before him
some red rag, and hurls himself upon it with the fury of the toro.’ Nor
did his sitters escape the consequences of his impetuosity. Many of his
portraits were painted in a day, but the sitting lasted not a few hours
merely but the whole of the day, during which time, Mr. Rothenstein
tells us, ‘Goya, inexorable towards his model, worked in absolute
silence with extraordinary concentration and vigour.’ The same writer
relates, as an example of his nervousness and irritability in his
studio, the story that the Duke of Wellington so exasperated Goya while
he was painting his portrait by passing comments upon his work while the
picture was in progress, that he took a sword from the wall and forced
his noble sitter to beat a retreat from his studio. Other authorities
state that it was with a pair of pistols that he put the English Duke to
flight. After all, the weapon is not a material point in the story.
A man who worked at this pressure might be expected to develop a
tendency to scamp his work, but while many of Goya’s compositions are
mere sketches, they are all finished according to his theory that ‘a
picture is finished when its effect is true.’ The many compositions Goya
executed for the Countess of Benavente, until recently at the Alameda
Palace, comprised the most representative exhibition of Goya’s genius.
The collection included many pictures painted with exceptional delicacy.
The most important of these pictures, the Romeria de San Isidro, is a
wonderful canvas containing a mass of details which astonish by their
clearness and finish. The ‘Coach attacked by Brigands’ is one example
among many of his skill in catching an instantaneous motion and
transfixing it upon the canvas. Among the Alameda paintings are some
repetitions of the designs for the tapestry factory. The exuberant
gaiety in these pictures is in amazing contrast with the ‘San Bernard’
or the terrifying cartoon of ‘Saturn devouring his Children.’ Goya can
be simple and bizarre, idyllic and grotesque, fascinating and
appalling--his vitality emphasises every facet of his imagination. The
examples of phases of his many-sided vision are inexhaustible. He makes
demons terrible by their humanity, and men and women horrible by their
diabolical sinisterism. He paints you a fête or a funeral, a picnic or a
hanging, with the same facility and artistic assurance; be the mood he
would portray gay or gloomy, the scene brilliant or shuddersome, the
beauty that of a child, a blushing maiden or a dazzling Maja, he never
hesitates, nor does he often come short of success.
In his portraits he is a realist--versatile, vivid, often unflinching in
his brutality, unsurpassed, when he wills it, in perfection of treatment
and intention. His finish is the fulfilment of his purpose, which has
nothing in common with finish in the sense of elaboration. True, many of
his likenesses are ‘washed in with a certain impatience, almost as if
the painter had tired of his subject’ (C. Gasquoine Hartley, in _A
Record of Spanish Painting_); true again, the restlessness of his
temperament made him inclined to seize on a characteristic rendering of
pose and feature: but his portraits reflect the idea in his mind; they
express the always very definite something he has to say; the effect is
true and the picture is finished. It was his method to arrange his
canvas, his model and all his accessories, and then remain wrapped in
profound reflection. When his study of his model was ended he set to
work, either to materialise his inspiration in a swift realisation of a
personality, or to produce a suave, lingering piece of workmanship which
recalls the refinement of Gainsborough in its elaborate, exquisite
detail.
Goya, by virtue of his portraits, has been rightly acclaimed the
legitimate descendant of Velazquez, and, like the great Court painter of
a previous century, he is a magnificent exception. But the comparison
between the two masters cannot be pushed too far. Velazquez was a
realist to whom the world appeared as a beautiful vision; Goya was a
realist to whom life was always a drama and not infrequently a satiric
melodrama played in the tempo of a farce. Velazquez depicted men and
women at their noblest; Goya, when he was in the mood, detected the
worst that was in them and he exposed it with a flourish. The grandeur
of the times which we discern in the portraits of Velazquez is the
grandeur of the artist’s conception and treatment. The equestrian
effigies of Philip III. and Philip IV. reveal the magnificence and
nobility of conscious kingship which neither of the monarchs possessed;
the royal likenesses convey to us a prosperity which impoverished Spain
did not enjoy under the rule of his kingly sitters. Thus it is curious
to find that some critics, but particularly the Conde de la Viñaza,
should see in Goya’s work a similar determination to idealise and
glorify the characters of his royal patrons. ‘The celebrated canvas of
the family of Charles IV.,’ writes Goya’s latest Spanish biographer,
‘together with the equestrian portraits’--the composition of which, as
Mr. Rothenstein reminds us, he may well have learned from Velazquez--‘of
Maria Luisa and her husband, of Ferdinand VII. and Godoy, show forth a
grandeur of mind and intellectual and moral qualities which these people
did not possess. The Godoy represented by Goya as though he were a sort
of Marquis de Pescara, although he never wore his uniform except at sham
fights, recalls the fact that Velazquez also, flattering the ridiculous
vanity of the Count-Duke of Olivarez, painted his portrait in a suit
which was not his own.... Goya painted moral life hyperbolically
idealised in his effigies of the kings, because he was painter to the
Household and protected by the Crown and the Court, although he was
rather the protector of his protectors. In all the other portraits of
statesmen, politicians, literati, scientific men, actors,
bull-fighters, priests and artists, Goya harmonised exactly the body and
the mind. How marvellously he caught the faces of the men of great
minds! How beautifully the moral and intellectual qualities of the
person represented are shown!’
A second and more cautious reading of the foregoing passage was required
to convince us that it was written without sarcasm, and was meant to
express a sober estimate of the qualities which the writer discovered in
the pictures referred to. Personal taste, as we have remarked elsewhere,
counts for much in the whole field of art, and in the opinion which is
quoted the Conde de la Viñaza has the field practically to himself.
Nearly all Goya’s critics and admirers are united in their appreciation
of the merciless and remorseless frankness, the pitiless satire, the
mocking, saturnine faithfulness of the likenesses. Sir William
Stirling-Maxwell misses the point of the equestrian portrait of Charles
IV. when he remarks that ‘the poor imbecile king, in the blue uniform
and cocked hat of a colonel of the guards, mounted on a sober brown
charger,’ is ‘an example of the dignity which may be conferred, by a
skilful hand, on the most ordinary features and expression, without
sacrificing the resemblance.’ But who beside Viñaza and Stirling-Maxwell
could detect anything but a burlesque of kingly dignity in this
grandly-uniformed, coarsely-made and coarse-faced Bourbon who sits
‘asthmatic and fat, upon his fat asthmatic horse, with his fat asthmatic
dog’--a study which moves a German critic to remark, ‘How like a Moloch
he appears, an evil god who has battened upon the life-blood of his
people.’
The portraits of his sensuous, passion-ridden queen are equally
fearless, true even to brutality. Maria Luisa was a courtesan seated
upon the throne of Spain. Velazquez, it has been wisely said, redeemed
the face of Mariana of Austria in his portrait by making her
unapproachable icy pride the keynote in his composition. Goya extenuates
nothing. He shows the queen, _décolletée_ to vulgarity in her insolently
vulgar gown, with gleaming arms and bosom exposed as a snare, which is
watched over by the greedy, hawk-like eyes. It is the woman she was, the
‘woman who loved men better perhaps than she was loved by them,’ the
courtesan that the artist knew and flattered and despised. Of the
picture of the ‘Family of Charles IV.,’ with its fourteen life-size
figures, it has been written that it ‘mirrors the hidden merriment with
which Goya recorded the Court history.’ Here is a faithful exposition of
Goya’s estimate of the Spanish royal family; an estimate which has never
been so remorselessly expressed by any other delineator of royal groups.
They are depicted in their resplendent uniforms and rich gowns, they
have all the dignity that is derived from gorgeous trappings, but Goya
has not spared them, or us, a tittle of their pitiful stupidity, their
coarse insolence, their mental and moral degeneracy. ‘The heads are
admirably painted, as Gautier admitted, ‘and are full of life, delicacy
and intelligence’; but the French critic’s general verdict upon the
group represented is his best tribute to the genius of the painter;--‘a
grocer’s family who have won the big lottery prize.’