Goya

Victoria Charles

Description

Goya is perhaps the most approachable of painters. His art, like his life, is an open book. He concealed nothing from his contemporaries, and offered his art to them with the same frankness. The entrance to his world is not barricaded with technical difficulties. He proved that if a man has the capacity to live and multiply his experiences, to fight and work, he can produce great art without classical decorum and traditional respectability. He was born in 1746, in Fuendetodos, a small mountain village of a hundred inhabitants. As a child he worked in the fields with his two brothers and his sister until his talent for drawing put an end to his misery. At fourteen, supported by a wealthy patron, he went to Saragossa to study with a court painter and later, when he was nineteen, on to Madrid. Up to his thirty-seventh year, if we leave out of account the tapestry cartoons of unheralded decorative quality and five small pictures, Goya painted nothing of any significance, but once in control of his refractory powers, he produced masterpieces with the speed of Rubens. His court appointment was followed by a decade of incessant activity – years of painting and scandal, with intervals of bad health. Goya’s etchings demonstrate a draughtsmanship of the first rank. In paint, like Velázquez, he is more or less dependent on the model, but not in the detached fashion of the expert in still-life. If a woman was ugly, he made her a despicable horror; if she was alluring, he dramatised her charm. He preferred to finish his portraits at one sitting and was a tyrant with his models. Like Velázquez, he concentrated on faces, but he drew his heads cunningly, and constructed them out of tones of transparent greys. Monstrous forms inhabit his black-and-white world: these are his most profoundly deliberated productions. His fantastic figures, as he called them, fill us with a sense of ignoble joy, aggravate our devilish instincts and delight us with the uncharitable ecstasies of destruction. His genius attained its highest point in his etchings on the horrors of war. When placed beside the work of Goya, other pictures of war pale into sentimental studies of cruelty. He avoided the scattered action of the battlefield, and confined himself to isolated scenes of butchery. Nowhere else did he display such mastery of form and movement, such dramatic gestures and appalling effects of light and darkness. In all directions Goya renewed and innovated.

Sujets

• Spanish
• Realism
• Painting
• Art
• Los caprichos
• Painter
• Court painter
• Caprichos
• Modern art
• Francisco Goya
• Artist
• Master
• Goya
• Peinture

Informations

• Publié par: Parkstone International
• Date de parution: 04 juillet 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781781605981
• Langue: English

Extrait

Author: Victoria Charles

Cover: Stéphanie Angoh

ISBN: 978-1-78160-598-1

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© Parkstone Press International, New York, USA

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Victoria Charles




Francisco Goya
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


1. Self-portrait, 1773-74.
2. Portrait of Martin Zapater, 1797.
3. Farnese Hercules,
4. Self-portrait, 1815.
5. Portrait of Josefa Bayeu (?), about 1798.
6. Prince Balthasar Carlos, 1778.
7. Self-portrait in the Studio, 1793-95.
8. Portrait of Charles III in Hunting Costume, 1787.
9. The Family of the Infante Don Luis, 1784.
10. Portrait of the Count of Floridablanca and Goya, 1784.
11. Charles IV, 1789.
12. Maria Luisa, 1789.
13. The Family of Charles IV, 1800-01.
14. The Countess of Chinchón, 1800.
15. Half Don Manuel Godoy as Commander in the 'War of the Oranges', about 1801.
16. Ferdinand VII, 1814.
17. Countess-Duchess of Benavente, 1785.
18. Duchess of Alba, 1797.
19. Dona Isabel de Porcel, 1804-05.
20. Adoration of the Name of God by Angels, 1772.
21. Betrothal of the Virgin, 1774.
22. St Bernardine of Siena preaching before Alfonso V of Aragon, 1781-83.
23. Mary, Queen of Martyrs, 1780-81.
24. Miracle of St Anthony of Padua, 1798.
25. The Crucifixion, 1780.
26. Saints Justa and Rufina, 1817.
27. Last Communion of St Joseph of Calasanz, 1819.
28. Agony in the Garden, 1819.
29. La Tauromaquia (The Art of Bullfighting), 1816.
30. The Bullfight, 1812-19.
31. Dancing by the River Manzanares, 1777.
32. Hunter loading his gun, 1812-23.
33. The Picnic, 1776.
34. The Parasol, 1777.
35. Summer (Harvesting), 1786-87.
36. Spring (The Flowergirls), 1786-87.
37. Autumn (The Vintage), 1786-87.
38. Winter (The Snow Tempest), 1786-87.
39. La Gallina Ciega (Blind Man's Buff), 1788-89.
40. The Meadow of San Isidro, 1788.
41. The Wedding, 1791-1792.
42. Las Gigantillas (Little Giants), 1791-92.
43. The Swing, 1787.
44. Highwaymen Attacking a Coach, 1787.
45. Nude Maja, 1798-1805.
46. Clothed Maja, 1798-1805.
47. Marquise of Santa Cruz, 1805.
48. Wounded Mason, 1786-87.
49. Milkgirl from Bordeaux, 1825-27.
50. El Maragato Points A Gun on Friar Pedro, about 1806-07.
51. Friar playing the guitar, from ‘Album H”, 1824-28,
52. Use of a pulley, ‘Album F56’,
53. Inquisition Scene, 1812-19.
54. Los desastres de la guerra (Disasters of War), 1810-20.
55. The Colossus, about 1808-12.
56. Cannibals Gazing At Their Victims, about 1800-08.
57. Second of May, 1808, 1814.
58. Third of May, 1808, 1814.
59. Corral de Locos (Yard with Lunatics), 1793-94.
60. L'Aquelarre (The Witches' Sabbath), 1797-98.
61. Saturn Devouring His Children, 1820-23.
62. Pilgrimage to San Isidro, 1820-23.
63. The Dog, 1820-23.
64. Fantastic Vision or Asmodea, 1820-23.
65. Promenade of the Holy Office, 1821-23.
1. Self-portrait , 1773-74.
Oil on canvas, 58 x 44 cm,
Ibercaja Collection, Saragossa.
"There are no rules in painting," Goya told the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid during an address he gave in 1792. He suggested that students should be allowed to develop their artistic talents freely and find inspiration from their own choice of masters rather than adhere to the doctrines of the neo-classical school. Goya himself was known to have claimed that Velázquez, Rembrandt and Nature were his masters, but his work defies neat categorization and the diversity of his style is remarkable.
Francisco Goya lived for eighty-two years (1746-1828), during which time he produced an enormous body of work - about 500 oil paintings and murals, nearly 300 etchings and lithographs, and several hundred drawings. He was proficient both as a painter and a graphic artist, and experimented with a variety of techniques; even at the end of his life he was a pioneer of the new printing method of lithography.

Essentially a figurative painter, Goya treated an enormous variety of subjects. He became the leading portrait painter in Spain, decorated the churches of Saragossa and Madrid with altarpieces and murals and designed tapestries illustrating life in Madrid. Numerous personal sketch books contain his private observations.
Two catastrophic events dramatically affected Goya's life and his vision of the world. The first came in 1792 when, at the age of forty-six, he was struck by an illness, probably an infection of the inner ear, that left him totally deaf. The second cataclysmic event was the Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808, which was followed by six years of fighting for Spanish independence. During the war, hideous atrocities were perpetrated by both sides, and Goya recorded many of them in a series of etchings which are testaments to the cruelty of mankind.

Francisco Goya, the son of a master gilder, was born on the 30th of March, 1746 in Fuendetodos, a small village in the barren Spanish province of Aragon. When Goya was a boy, the family moved to the busy commercial center of Saragossa, the capital of Aragon. Goya went to school at a religious foundation, the Escuelas Pias de San Antón. Here he met Martin Zapater, who would become a faithful friend.
Aged fourteen, Goya took lessons in drawing and painting from José Luzàn y Martinez, a local religious painter, who introduced his pupils to the works of the Old Masters through engravings he made them copy. Among Luzán's other pupils were three gifted brothers, Francisco, Manuel and Ramon Bayeu, who were to become his brothers-in-law.
In 1763, Goya submitted a drawing to the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid in the hope of gaining a place, but his entry gained not a single vote from the academic judges. Three years later, he tried again - and failed. In 1770, Goya went to Italy, probably travelling to Rome and Naples and in April 1771 he received special mention for a painting he submitted to the Accademia di Belle Arti in Parma. By June of the same year, he had returned to Saragossa where he received his first important commission, the decoration of the ceiling of the coreto, or choir, of the Basilica of El Pilar, the city's great cathedral.

In July 1773, he married Josefa Bayeu, the sister of his three fellow pupils. Francisco Bayeu was, by this time, employed in decorating the new Royal Palace in Madrid under Anton Mengs, a leading exponent of the neo-classical style, and Goya hoped, no doubt, to further his career by marrying the sister of a prominent painter. The couple had seven children, although only one son, Mariano, survived to adulthood. In the winter of 1774, Goya and Josefa settled in Madrid. The capital city had been transformed during the eighteenth century by the Spanish Bourbon kings, who widened streets, opened piazzas and constructed numerous religious and civic buildings. They also expanded the five Habsburg palaces and created three new royal residences, requiring a team of designers to decorate their interiors.

In 1775, Anton Mengs (1728-79), first court painter to Charles III, returned to Madrid and was given the responsibility of overseeing the execution of numerous tapestry cartoons. The Goyas move came in response to his first royal commission, to design a series of cartoons for tapestries to hang in the personal dining room of the future King Charles IV, in the Escorial Palace. Goya was given the commission at the suggestion of Mengs, who had earlier commissioned Francisco Bayeu to work on the new royal palaces. For several years, Goya was gainfully employed painting further series of cartoons for the Royal Tapestry Factory. During the 1780s, Goya's career prospered. Finally elected to the Royal Academy of San Fernando in 1780, he became its Assistant Director of Painting in 1785.