GOYA Y LUCIENTES, FRANCISCO José. - Spanish painter, b. at Fuendetodos near Saragossa on 30 March 1746, d. at Bordeaux on 16 April 1828.
He was a pupil in Saragossa of José Luzán y Martínez, who had also studied in Italy, especially in Naples, where he had been a fellow student of Solimena. In Saragossa he remained from 1760 to 1765, when he went to Madrid, an environment in which Mengs and G. B. Tiepolo had been active for several years.
But in Madrid the fiery Spaniard, more than he painted, thought of living his life to the full, even descending into the arena as a bullfighter, until in 1769, perhaps on the advice of Mengs himself, he went to Rome, from where, however, he had to be sent home because of the adventurous life he led there. On his return to Saragossa in 1772 he received important commissions and it may be said that from this moment he began his effective artistic career. In the vault of the small choir of the cathedral of Nuestra Señora del Pilar he painted the Glory of Heaven (1772), a cold Tiepolesque imitation, and the paintings for the monastery of Aula Dei are also linked to Tiepolo. More personal (and therefore by some critics considered to have been executed earlier) are the murals now in the Saragossa Museum, coming from the Palace of Sabradiel. About 1775 he married the sister of the painter F. Bayeu, with whom he collaborated in Madrid in preparing the cartoons for the tapestries of the royal factory of Santa Barbara. It was to these cartoons (which G. painted at intervals until 1791) that the painter owed much of his popularity, which also procured him portrait commissions. In 1780 he was appointed a member of the “Academy of Painting of San Fernando,” presenting as his admission piece the Crucifix now in the Prado, which, though academic in conception, yet reveals in its vigorous brushstrokes the mark of his rebellious spirit. It was this same spirit that led him also in the tapestry cartoons—true interpretations of Spanish life of the time—to free himself from the imitation of French tapestries (to which he had succumbed in his early attempts) and to arrive at a more personal interpretation, with strong contrasts of light (The Maja and the Cloakman, The Drinker, The Umbrella, etc.). Related to the popular characterizations of the cartoons are then also the religious figures painted in one of the domes of the church of El Pilar in Saragossa (1781–82); of 1781–84 is the large composition with St. Bernardino of Siena preaching to Alfonso of Aragon for the church of San Francisco el Grande. Of a few years later (c. 1785) are the Annunciation (Duchess of Osuna, Madrid) and St. Gregory and St. Isidore (Romantic Museum, Madrid). Among the most famous portraits of these years are to be remembered that of the architect Ventura Rodríguez (1781), of Cornelio van der Gotten (1872, Prado), of the family of the Infante Don Luis (1783), that of his patrons, the Duke and Duchess of Osuna with their four children (Prado), of King Charles IV in hunting costume and of the Queen, now in the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, and of his brother-in-law Bayeu. In the tapestry cartoons of these years, moreover, he abandons the harsh contrasts of light, immersing the compositions in a warm golden light. In 1785 he became president of the Academy; in 1788 he was appointed court painter by Charles IV and a year later painted for the chapel of the Valencia cathedral the Death of St. Francis Borgia and St. Francis comforting a dying man. In 1792 a serious illness made him deaf and the optimism that had hitherto sustained him vanished. The painter shut himself in isolation but his prodigious activity did not diminish, and besides portraits one recalls the murals in S. Antonio della Florida (near Madrid, 1798), the Rembrandtesque Betrayal of Judas in the cathedral of Toledo and the publication (1797) of the Caprichos, the famous engravings that reveal him as a caustic observer, a merciless critic of false traditions, superstitions, and fanaticism. To the first years of the 19th century may be attributed the portrait of the family of Charles IV (Prado), the two Majas, the portrait of his new powerful patron, the prime minister Godoy, and perhaps to this period may also be attributed the six paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago representing the Capture of the bandit Margato by the friar Pedro de Zaldívia. In 1808, after the abdication of Charles IV in favor of Ferdinand VII, the painter passed into the service of the new sovereign and painted his equestrian portrait. Then the Napoleonic invasion upset Spain; G. was at first among the sympathizers of the revolutionary movement, but soon his enthusiasm waned and he became indeed one of the most tenacious opponents of the foreign master, and from his embittered soul sprang the engravings of the Disasters of War (published posthumously in 1863), a pitiable act of indictment of French domination. After the French had left in 1814, in an attempt to celebrate Spanish resistance he executed the equestrian portrait of General Palafox (Prado) and the famous 2nd and 3rd of May. In 1815 he published the series of engravings of Tauromaquia; then that of the Proverbs, Disparates, many of which are obscure in meaning. Of 1819 are two of his most notable religious paintings, the Communion of St. Joseph Calasanz and the Agony in the Garden (Escuelas Pias, Madrid). Following the establishment of the absolutism of Ferdinand VII (1823), the artist preferred to leave Spain and in 1824, at the age of 78, he moved to France, settling in Bordeaux, where he continued to draw and paint. Belonging to this last period are The Milkmaid of Bordeaux (Count of Muguiro, Madrid), St. Peter (Phillips Memorial Gallery, Washington, 1827) and St. Paul (Lilienfeld Galleries, New York, 1827).
G.’s art is truly, and not only for Spain, the announcement of a new epoch. The Spanish painter breaks away from the conformism of