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Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was
born in Fuendetodos in 1740, a town close to Saragossa in the North
east of Spain. Shortly after his family moved to nearby Saragossa
and this is where he spent the early years of his life. At the
age of 14 he was apprenticed to José Luzanan, an artist
and friend of his father. He later was to continue his studies
of art in Italy before returning to Saragossa in 1771 where landed
the job of painting frescoes in city’s cathedral. This work,
done in the classic Rococo style, established an excellent reputation
for Goya as an artist and prepared the foundations for much of
his later success. In 1773 Goya married Josefa Bayeu, the sister
of local artist Francisco Bayeu.
From 1775-92 Goya was to work for the Royal Tapestry Factory
in Madrid helping to paint the designs. The work served as an excellent
means of broadening Goya’s horizons and developing him as
an artist – his studies of the work of Velasquez also influenced
his style, giving Goya a slightly freer hand in his paintings with
more imagination. In 1786 Goya was appointed as painter to the
King and just three years later, he was made the court painter.
During this period, Goya painted Charles IV and Ferdinand VII and
also gained a lot of respect as a portrait painter to the aristocracy.
Tragedy was to befall Goya in 1792 when he contracted a serious
illness that resulted in the loss of his hearing. Modern scientists
believe it may have had something to do with the large amount of
lead in the paints available at the time. A fairly paranoid individual
anyway, Goya’s deafness caused him to withdraw even more
from the world. In 1799 he completed some of his most famous works,
a collection of 80 prints entitled “Los Caprichos”.
The works were a stark collection, satirising human weakness and
Goya’s own mental struggle is captured within them. Amongst
his other great works of the period are “The Nude Maja” and “The
Clothed Maja”. The first painting was received with general
outrage so Goya did another painting of the same scene but without
the nudity. Both are now viewed as seminal works.
Goya became more and more recluse and retired to his villa in
Madrid; “Quinto del Sordo” (House of the deaf man)
as the Napoleonic wars raged. When Bonaparte’s troops seized
power in Spain, Goya produced some of his frankest and most challenging
work on the subject of war; the most famous painting from the time
being the brutal “The Disasters of War”. It lays bear
the atrocities of some of the French soldiers and also shows the
spirit and resistance of the Spanish people.
However Goya’s most disturbing work was still to come,
between 1819 and 1923 he produced 14 works that are now known as
the “Black Paintings”. Insanity, madness and fantasy
are all recurrent themes throughout the series in which Goya used
a lot less colour and a much darker palette in general. The most
brutal painting of the period is undoubtedly “Saturn devouring
his son”, a depiction of the God eating his offspring in
bloody fashion. Other telling paintings from the series are “The
great he-goat” and “Fight with clubs”, all tell
of Goya’s haunted mental state at the time, he’d been
lucky enough to survive two near-fatal illnesses and he lived in
fear of a relapse. Goya eventually died aged 82 in self-imposed
exile in Bordeaux.
Today the best place to see his work is the Prado Museum in Madrid.
Goya’s work earned him the title of “the father of
the moderns” and his influence on painters of the contemporary
era can be traced to his sharp observational style and his tendencies
to paint as he saw, with little regard for conventional beauty. |
