{i} 

THE SPANISH SERIES


GOYA {ii} 

{iii} 

GOYA

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{v} 

{vii} 

Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty

PREFACE

It has been said that in England everybody knows of Cervantes, but very few persons have more than a nodding acquaintance with Don Quixote, and Goya’s reputation in this country is even less securely founded. The great Aragonese is indeed little more than a name to the general public, and his work is literally unknown. Two little books—Mr. W. Rothenstein’s Goya, now out of print, and a monograph by Mr. Richard Muther in the Langham Series—are the only volumes in English dealing exclusively with a painter who for more than half a century might have been described, with more aptness than that with which the words were applied to Zurbarán, as ‘All Spain.’ As sincere a lover and as brilliant a transcriber of the beautiful as Watteau and Van Loo, a greater realist than Hogarth, and in portraiture second only to Velazquez, Goya stands out as the greatest artist Spain has produced since the death of the great Court painter of Philip IV.

The fact that Spanish art reflects the aspirations and is largely concerned with the repre{viii}sentation of scenes selected by its chief patron, the Spanish Catholic Church, accounts, in some measure, for the lack of sympathy and appreciation with which it is regarded in this country, but this prejudice does not explain the neglect from which Goya has suffered. Goya, it is true, accepted commissions from the Church, but his religious subjects do not comprise a tenth of his canvases, and in his etchings and engravings he is seen only as a secular moralist. As the painter of the Spanish Rococo period, he dipped his brush in beauty, gaiety, and humour; as a portraitist he was vivid, surprising, audacious, a maker of masterpieces; while his etchings constitute an unrivalled commentary upon the spirit of the age, recorded by its ‘most fearless and advanced thinker.’

Goya’s art would appear to be the reflection of his life. His youth was disordered and tempestuous; in the height of his success he accepted favours, but he was too conscientious an artist to repay the adulation of the world by flattering it in his canvases; and he published his disillusions in the biting satire of his Caprices and Proverbs.

The authorities I have consulted would make a formidable list, but among those to whom{ix} I am under special obligation I must mention the ‘Lives’ of Goya by the Conde de la Viñaza, Paul Lefort, Paul Lafond, W. Rothenstein, Richard Muther and Julius Hofmann; Valerian von Loga’s works on Goya’s etchings and engravings; Don Juan de la Rada’s chapter on ‘Goya’s Frescoes in the Church of San Antonio de la Florida;’ Muther’s appreciation of Goya in his History of Modern Painting; Stirling-Maxwell’s Annals of the Artists of Spain; Carl Justi’s ‘Sketch of Spanish Art’ in Baedeker’s Spain and Portugal; C. Gasquoine Hartley’s Spanish Painting; the Boletin de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones; and Théophile Gautier’s brilliant study of Goya in his Travels in Spain.

In making the collection of Goya’s works that is presented at the end of this volume, I have taken the line of least resistance and included reproductions of every picture, etching, or lithograph that I could acquire. However inadequate photography and ‘process’ may be to convey an impression of the original works, I have endeavoured to give English students an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the subjects and general nature of much of the output of Goya’s sixty years of artistic effort.{x}

In the compilation of the appended exhaustive catalogue of Goya’s works, which I am not without hope may be found of practical value, I have derived no little assistance from Spanish and German publications and from the list prepared by M. Paul Lafond. To Señor Don Mariano Moreno, who has made a special study of Goya and his work, I am indebted for descriptions of many pictures which are published here for the first time, and my thanks are also due to him for permission to reproduce from his collection a number of photographs which were new to me. I have also to acknowledge the kindness of the authorities of the Academy of San Fernando in allowing me to publish copies of the different prints of Goya’s works issued by the Academy; and to express my thanks to Señor Don J. Lacoste, Messrs. Braun, Clement and Co., Messrs. Mansell and Co., and Herr Franz Hanfstaengl, for their courtesy in supplying me with various pictures included in this collection and permitting me to reproduce them.

A. F. C.
{xi}

ILLUSTRATIONS

{1}

GOYA

I

A century before the birth of Goya, Spanish painting had attained its crown of achievement in the work of the four great naturalists, Velazquez, Ribera, Zurbarán, and Murillo. Josef de Ribera (‘Lo Spagnoletto’), had succeeded Ribalta, and had given lasting expression to the realism which characterised Spanish art in the seventeenth century; Francisco de Zurbarán, the Estremaduran peasant, whom Lord Leighton called ‘All Spain,’ carried on the tradition of the elder Herrera in his passion for truth in detail and in the dramatic intensity of his expression; Murillo, the disciple of the Spanish Catholic Church, bewitched his generation with what Antonio Castillo y Saavedra described as his ‘wondrous grace and beauty of colouring’; and Velazquez, ‘our Velazquez,’ as Palomino proudly styled him, was the supreme painter{2} through whom Spanish art became the light of a new artistic life.

Of Velazquez it has been said that he attained perfection in the realism of detail and in the realism of sight, and in his commanding genius Spanish art was emancipated from the fetters of pseudo-Italianism in which it had laboured so long. He carried Spanish realism to its Ultima Thule. Further his age could not go, and generations of artists who came after him devoted themselves to the imitation and reproduction of his colour and his technique with such passionate servility that in the end the copy of the pupil was frequently mistaken for the work of the master. The perfect technique of the great Court painter had, in his own day, the effect of arresting artistic development—it left his successors nothing to solve for themselves. He achieved so much in his own work that, for a time, the last word in art seemed to have been spoken. Until his influence had died away, the reproduction of Velazquez was the aim of the Madrid painters. For this reason, after the death of Velazquez, the artistic life of the seventeenth century became a spent force, and for want of new impetus of original genius, Spanish art steadily declined. The followers of{3} the supreme painter failed to realise the true inwardness of his message. They had the seed, but they could raise no new flower. One feels towards the pictures of Velazquez as Swinburne felt towards the muse of Sappho:

But the reverent desire to perpetuate ‘this best thing’ could not arrest the decay of artistic inspiration. The disciples of Velazquez copied and painted successfully (up to a point), and they trained other generations of imitators who continued to work and teach their methods, until imitation slowly but surely sank into artistic degradation. Under the sway of Mariana of Austria, the decay of Spanish painting was further hastened, and the ascendency of the facile, brilliant brush of Luca Giordano, under Charles II., dealt the death-blow to the realistic impulse that had carried the national school of the middle seventeenth century to the realisation of its utmost ambition.

The decadence which followed the death of {4}Velazquez was most pronounced among the Castilian painters, but the empire of Giordano extended to the Provincial schools and completed the more gradual decline of art in Andalusia and Valencia. Seville was foredoomed to decadence as a school of painting, for its artists had taken Murillo as their model, and in servilely imitating the ‘Painter of the Conceptions,’ they emphasised his faults, exaggerated his unreality, and caricatured his affectations. The popular admiration of Murillo was all-powerful to hasten the general decline, and each year the artistic outgrowth of Andalusia became more enfeebled.

In the last months of the seventeenth century Charles II. died without issue and the art-loving Austrian dynasty was ended. The succeeding Bourbon sovereigns brought with them an art derived from France; they had no ambition to reanimate the native art of the country. Madrid became the only recognised art centre in Spain, and to Madrid, in 1761, came, at the invitation of Charles III., Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, the Venetian fresco-painter, and the Saxon pedant, Anton Raphael Mengs. The Spanish painters who had rendered homage to the facile Giordano were caught by the glamour of the fantastic, insincere art of Tiepolo, while the dreary academic influence of Mengs—whose{5} paintings are declared by Carl Justi to echo the last shadow of eclectic mannerism—made for all that is dull, exact, and lifeless in pictorial art. No great Spaniard arose to counteract the demoralising influence of these imported professors; it was realised in the studios of Madrid that the methods of the favoured aliens led to popularity and fortune; the Spanish artists followed the line of least resistance, nor desisted when they found that it carried them ever further from the tradition founded by Velazquez.

This art, dull but without dignity, showy but meaningless, was the reflex of the prevailing rottenness in the national life. During the reign of Charles III. a certain superficial decency was observed; the corruptness of Court life was kept out of sight; a general conspiracy of make-believe was maintained. But under Maria Luisa of Parma and Charles IV., the abomination of moral desolation in social, political and artistic life was complete and confessed. Manuel Godoy, afterwards Prince de la Paz, was Prime Minister of Spain, and the country was demoralised by dissolute courtiers and unscrupulous ministers, and drained by insatiable priests. But in the turmoil created by an aristocracy sunk in lasciviousness, a government steeped in cor{6}ruption, and a commonalty beaten and bled into a state of nerveless resignation, was heard the echo of the revolutionary movement which was sweeping over Europe. The teaching of Goethe and Schiller, followed by the preaching of Rousseau, had taken concrete form in the butcheries of Robespierre and Danton; the movement had culminated in the personal supremacy of Napoleon Buonaparte.

The hopes of the Spanish nation were centred in the Crown Prince Ferdinand. Even as the First of the Tigers thought to exterminate Fear by killing a man, the Spaniards believed that the abdication of Charles IV. would make an end of misrule and give their country peace and prosperity. But the King hated his son, and inspired by the double purpose of defeating the ambition of the Crown Prince and punishing the disloyalty of his subjects, he laid his crown at the feet of the Emperor of the French, who bestowed it upon his brother, Joseph Buonaparte. The Spanish liberals made the alien king welcome, but the Spanish loyalists proved a constant thorn in the side of the usurper, and at the end of five years Joseph Buonaparte fled Madrid. Two years later the Prince of the Asturias returned to Spain to be crowned king as Ferdinand {7}VII. Again the distressful country was plunged into the depths of retrogression, clericalism, and fanaticism. Spain was undergoing her fate.

The strong men of the troublous times of the eighteenth century were the revolutionaries and reformers, and, as was inevitable, they sprang from the people. Rousseau, Robespierre, Napoleon, these were the forces that directed the movement, the effect of which was to make itself felt from one end of Europe to the other. Goya was a revolutionary. He lived under four kings of Spain. He was elected a member of the Académia de San Fernando in the reign of Charles III.; Charles IV. appointed him Pintor de Cámara del Rey; he took the oath of allegiance to Joseph Buonaparte and painted the usurper’s portrait; Ferdinand VII., who declared that he had deserved death for his defection from the Bourbon cause, condemned the man but pardoned the artist and received him as a member of the new Court. Critical opinion condones Goya’s flexible patriotism by the fact that ‘it was a period of national disaster,’ and that ‘national calamity was not altered by these trivialities.’

Goya, we are reminded, was a revolutionary; he was also a pitiless, if quizzical, onlooker at{8} the life of the Madrid Court. It was a simple matter to him to transfer his allegiance from the Bourbons to Joseph Buonaparte, and it was even more simple to welcome Ferdinand VII. to the throne. ‘What did such changes matter in years of irretrievable ruin?’ writes C. Gasquoine Hartley, in A Record of Spanish Painting. The question may be left for the individual to answer according to his own fancy. And if Goya was, as some will find, an opportunist, a political weathercock, and a moral Vicar of Bray, as an artist he was a great reformative force. Alternately an idealist and a realist, he fought with all the social forces and against the academic standards of the school commanded by David and Mengs, destroying the debased conventions of painting and freeing the brush from the domination of a clique. A national artist par excellence, he gave lasting form to the sentiments, customs and conditions of his country. A profound believer in empiricism, a great humourist, sometimes impetuous and fantastic, at other times holding fast to reality; a master of portraiture; fantastic, inspired, spontaneous in his aquafortis etchings; he seized upon and immortalised every aspect of the gruesome tragi-comedy which was played in Spain in the last years of the eighteenth century.{9}

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was born at the end of March (the 30th or 31st) 1746 at Fuentetodos near Zaragoza, in Aragon, the province which gave to the nation poets like the ‘Spanish Horaces,’ historians like Zurita, teachers like Gracián and Luzán, a scholar like Latassa, and a statesman like the Conde de Aranda. Goya was baptized in the Church of Our Lady of the Ascent, and the names given him by his godmother, Francesca de Grasa, were Francis Joseph. The amiable weakness for connecting great men with great families has prompted a German biographer to claim that both his father and mother belonged to the nobility, and that his first patron was the Duque de Fuentes. Less imaginative authorities, however, tell us that his parents, José Goya and Gracia Lucientes, were poor but hardworking peasants, and that when ‘the regenerator of the Spanish school of naturalistic painters’—to quote the prefatory note to Goya’s pictures in the Prado catalogue—had completed his course of elementary instruction at the hands of the village schoolmaster, he was put to agriculture. A fortunate accident revealed the bent of the lad’s genius and liberated him, at the age of fourteen, from the drudgery of manual labour.{10}

M. Matheron relates that the lad had been sent with a sack of wheat to a neighbouring mill, when a monk of Zaragoza (probably Father Felix Salvador of the Carthusian convent of Aula Dei) happened upon him. Goya, seated on his burden, was intent upon drawing a pig with a piece of charcoal upon a whitewashed wall. The priest, struck by the correct free lines traced by the youngster, inquired who his master was and received the characteristic reply: ‘I have none, your reverence. It is not my fault, I cannot keep from drawing.’ The overmastering incentive pleaded by the youthful delinquent never forsook him, and, although powerful enemies resented his too free use of the pencil, and the Holy Inquisition was moved to curb his unwearied industry, he continued to ply brush and needle and gavel during sixty-eight years of changing, strenuous life. Father Salvador remained Goya’s friend until his death. He saw his father, and obtained permission from him, in 1760, for the lad to go to Zaragoza. The imperial city exercised a powerful influence upon his art. There is always in his pictures, as one of his countrymen points out, the Zaragoza landscape, so rich in the contrasts of its splendid and vigorous vegetation, recalling{11} the banks of the Genil or the Turia, while its limy hills and grey plains bring to the memory the vistas of Castile. The melancholy of the sky—pierced by the severe lines of innumerable towers and bounded by the austere distant rock—remind us that here the sun has not the same suggested warmth that supplied the rays for Murillo’s brush; that this is not the land of fancy but the land of genius, cold as the snow of the Moncayo, that adds beauty to the beautiful plants which produce not sweet odours but healing balsams.

Thanks to the friendly offices of Father Salvador, Goya was admitted to the studio of José Luzán y Martinez, whose religious and historical pictures bear evidence of soft fresh colouring. He attended, too, the school founded in 1714 by the sculptor Juan Ramirez, a pupil of the well-intentioned Gregoria de Mesa. In the studio of Martinez, Goya, who from the first betrayed his lifelong passion for realism, worked with untiring ardour, stimulated, it may be, by the industry of his co-pupils, José Beratón, Tómas Vallespin, and the Huesca jeweller, Antonio Martinez, who founded, in Madrid, the silversmith’s business which still bears his name. ‘In the schools of Zaragoza,’ says C. Gasquoine{12} Hartley, ‘he followed no conventional standards, and his continuous study was directed to the development of his exuberant individuality. To comprehend the truth, and afterwards to depict it, as it pleased his ever-varying fancy, this was his great aim. His utterance was inevitable and instinctive, the overflow of his dramatic, inexhaustible and vivid imagination.’

Goya’s exuberant, passionate temperament betrayed itself in other directions outside his art. He lived, as he worked, in a condition of unconventional, even arrogant independence. Many tales of the wild escapades of his youth are told. His revolutionary tendencies embroiled him in frequent altercations; thrice he is said to have fallen under the ban of the Inquisition. Zaragoza finally grew unsafe for him, and in 1766 he fled to Madrid. There are no discovered documents relating to his first years in Madrid, and his biographers, for the most part, preserve a discreet reticence concerning his mode of life in the capital. It is supposed that he copied Velazquez, and the pictures at the Casa de Campo, the seat of the Duque de Arcos. It has even been surmised that, through his friendship with Bayeu, he had the entrée to the royal palaces of La Zarzuela, Aranjuez, and the{13} Escorial. Other writers favour the idea that he lived the life of a young revolutionary, and Richard Muther, in his monograph of the painter, pictures him ‘wild and passionate, an athlete in his physical strength,’ being ‘everywhere present when dancing or love-making, scuffling or stabbing, is going forward.’ The one outstanding fact, upon which most biographers are agreed, is that one morning he was found lying in the streets with a dagger in his back. This occurrence, supplemented, it is said, by his misfortune in again incurring the displeasure of the Inquisition—some hold that he was placed under police supervision—made him once more seek safety in flight. He had a will to visit Rome, but no money to defray his travelling expenses. Tradition declares that he joined himself to a company of bull-fighters, worked his way to the coast as a picador, and set sail for Italy.

Iriarte is the authority for most of the details concerning this period of Goya’s career. French writers declare that the painter remained in Italy from 1769 to 1774. There is a full-length likeness of Pope Benedict XIV. still in the Vatican which is said to have been painted by Goya in a few hours, but as that pontiff died in 1756 there is much reason to doubt the truth of the legend.{14}

The Conde de la Viñaza in his Life of Goya refutes every detail of this story. It is said that while Goya was in Italy he secured a prize offered by the Parma Academy of Fine Arts for a picture of ‘Hannibal surveying Rome from a pinnacle of the Alps,’ but the Conde maintains that Goya at this time was in Spain and that it was in his own country he painted his picture and carried off the second prize. In the Mercure de France of January 1772 we read: ‘Le 27 Juin dernier l’Académie Royale des Beaux Arts de Parme tint sa séance publique pour la distribution de ses prix. Le sujet de peinture était: “Annibal vainqueur du haut des Alpes jette ses premiers regards sur les campagnes d’Italie.”... Le premier prix de peinture a été accordé au tableau qui avait devise: “Montes fregit aceto,” et qui était de monsieur Paul Borroni etc. Le second prix de peinture a été remporté par M. François Goya romain (sic), élève de M. Vajeu, peintre du roi d’Espagne.’

The following paragraph by M. Paul Mantz from the same source is quoted into the Archives de l’art français: ‘L’Académie a remarqué avec plaisir dans le second tableau un beau maniement de pinceau, de la chaleur d’expression dans le{15} regard d’Annibal et un caractère de grandeur dans l’attitude de ce général. Si M. Goya se fût moins écarté dans sa composition du sujet du programme, et s’il eût mis plus de vérité dans son coloris, il aurait balancé les suffrages pour le premier prix.’

The Conde de la Viñaza, Goya’s Spanish biographer, maintains that this picture was painted and the prize won before the artist went to Italy, and he proves, by the publication of documents preserved in the Archives of the Pilar Cathedral at Zaragoza, that in October 1771 the painter, forsaking Madrid, was back on the banks of the Ebro in the enjoyment of an enviable reputation. This is in direct contradiction to the old stories describing a love adventure as the reason for his sudden and hasty departure from Rome. A mad enterprise which had for its object the rescue of a young maid from a convent ended, it is said, in his capture, and he ‘only escaped the gallows by the most reckless and headlong flight.’ This much we know, that Goya was in Zaragoza in 1771. He returned not as a fugitive and an outlaw, but as a reputable citizen having the confidence of the Cathedral authorities, who commissioned him to paint the quadrangular vault in the Holy Chapel. The{16} fresco which he prepared as a proof that ‘he was experienced in this kind of painting,’ was submitted to the Building Committee of the Cathedral, on November 11, 1771, together with the director’s assurance that it had received the approval of experts, and with Goya’s offer to paint the vault of the small choir for 15,000 reals, he providing the labourers and materials. The Committee, having heard this proposition and recognising it as better than that made by Don Antonio Velazquez, who asked 25,000 reals for the work, ‘agreed to Goya’s proposition, but in order to be safe and sure,’ it was stipulated that he should make some further studies and submit them to Madrid for the approval of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (San Fernando), ‘which obtained, the negotiations would be completed and the contract signed.’

On January 27, 1772, Goya presented his study to the Committee, who having ‘already been informed that it was a skilful piece of work in specially good style,’ approved it, and waiving the stipulation that it should be submitted to the Royal Academy, they decided that the artist should forthwith proceed with the work. The documents give no information concerning the progress of the work, but we learn from a minute{17} in the Building Committee’s meeting, held on June 1, 1772, that the painting of the choir was nearly finished by that date, and the scaffolding was about to be taken down.

We are without any authentic particulars concerning the next three years of Goya’s life, but the Conde de la Viñaza supposes that with the 15,000 reals which this work brought him, he went to Italy. How he passed his time there cannot be definitely stated, but many interesting surmises have obtained currency. We are assured by Mr. Muther that for Goya ‘the antique had no more existence than the magnificent art of the cinque-cento: what attracted him was rather the teeming life of the people. Out of the red robes of the priests, the costumes, gay with colour, of the women of Trastevere, the merry, careless freedom of the Lazzaroni, he created fragments of life, rich with all its varied colour. Muleteers with their jangling cars, religious processions and Carnivale masques,’ to say nothing of much ‘love-making, scuffling and stabbing’—these are imagined to be the influences that directed his genius during his stay in Italy. Paul Lafond (Goya), while admitting the legendary element in most of the reported incidents in the life of the painter, repeats the stories of his ascending{18} to the lantern in the dome of St. Peter’s, of his making a tour of Cecilia Melella’s tomb, walking upright on the narrow ledge of the cornice, of his amatory escapade at a convent and its resultant flight from Rome. He also adds that his genre pictures attracted so much attention in Rome that the Russian ambassador, instructed by his sovereign to invite a number of distinguished artists to establish themselves at the Court at St. Petersburg, made Goya a very tempting offer, which he refused. On the other hand, the Conde de la Viñaza declares that ‘he was frequently seen studying the most sublime frescoes in the land, leaning boldly on the decorations of the architraves or on the most dangerous parts of the cornices’; that he secured the necessaries of life by the sale of pictures of the customs of his native land; that he made the acquaintance of Luis David, for whom he formed a deep and lasting attachment; and, finally, that ‘the only recollection he preserved of Italy in his old age was of his having met there the painter of “The Rape of the Sabines.”’

The friendship that existed between Goya and David has called attention to the similarities in the temperament and the aims of the two men, whose work was so widely different. Both used{19} their brushes to glorify the throne and received honours from kings; both sacrificed tradition on the altar of new ideas; and both lacked the tenderness and the faith necessary in the treatment of religious subjects. David was the friend of Robespierre and Saint Just, of Marat and Buonaparte; he painted the ‘Coronation of the Hero of the Pyramids’; he attended the Convention and voted for the death of Louis XVI. Goya was the friend of Godoy and of the ministers of Joseph Buonaparte; he painted the pictures of the Usurper as well as those of the kings that preceded and followed him; and he executed ‘The Disasters of War’ and ‘The Caprices.’ David was ambitious for the aggrandisement of his art, and Goya strove to make it worthy of its civilising mission, but they differed in the means by which they sought to attain their respective ends. David was inspired by the antique, and produced works which possessed the hardness of statuary as well as its clear-cut accuracy of form, while Goya went direct to nature for his inspiration, and his paintings are the reflections of naked reality. The painter of ‘The Death of Socrates’ was imbued with the guiding purpose of making his work dignified, elaborately accurate, and ex{20}clusive, while the author of the frescoes of La Florida, drawing inspiration from the customs of the toilers and the dandies alike, held that ‘a picture is finished when its effect is true.’ David represented man endowed with improbable and unattractive virtues, Goya painted man as he was; David idealised the individual form with classic grandeur, and his austere and solemn compositions, though based on observation of nature, were moulded to a fixed external idea; but Goya was as faithful to psychologic truth as to anatomy, and his brush revealed the moral sentiments of mankind and laid bare the passionate and terrible emotions of the human soul.

When Goya returned to Madrid in 1775 Spanish art was directed by Mengs and Tiepolo, by Maëlla and Francesco Bayeu. Mengs, the ‘reasoning artificer,’ who had neglected the world of nature in his servile study of Raphael and the antique, was a painter who theorised much and invented little. According to Richard Cumberland he was an artist incapable of portraying either life or death; a painter whose creations neither terrify nor inspire passion or transport; a timid, conscientious craftsman with an excellent hand for miniature. Yet Mengs,{21} the ‘Spanish David,’ as we are told by José de Madrazo, was regarded by the youth of his time as ‘the regenerator of the antique,’ and from the dictatorial chair of pictorial art, his voice ‘was heard like that of an oracle, not so much by the artistic cohorts of agitated Germany, where he received little attention, as by the peaceful Italo-Spanish pleiades, who applauded with enthusiasm the exhumation of the Hellenic form from among the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii, because it was the fashion, and without comprehending the reach of that fortuitous event.’

In the fantastic, beautiful, but slightly handled compositions of Battista Tiepolo we have the reaction against this form of classicism. The Venetian possessed a fertile and brilliant fancy, his execution was free and daring, if at times careless, and, in addition, he had a wide knowledge of the resources of his art. His decorations in the new palace at Madrid were ‘extolled to the skies of a generation that had forgotten Velazquez.’ Tiepolo got his effects rapidly; Mengs was laborious to a fault, but his work was probably a better guide for second-rate painters, themselves poorly equipped in knowledge, than the clearly (though incorrectly) drawn com{22}positions of his Venetian contemporary. As director of the Académia de San Fernando, Mengs suggested several new laws for the government of the students and certain alterations in the methods of study. These were at first adopted, but in carrying them into effect the director seems to have met with opposition and involved himself in quarrels, which ‘did little credit to the wisdom of his fellow-directors, or to his own temper and tact.’ As a result of these dissensions Mengs failed to accomplish all his reforms, but he secured several important changes in the Academy. It was due to his efforts that plaster casts were taken of the statues discovered at Herculaneum. Charles III. dowered the institution with a rich collection of marbles and bronzes which had been presented to his Majesty by Mengs, and he supplemented this gift with a large number of statues and busts from the Museum of Cristina of Sweden, and with pictures from the royal galleries and from the suppressed houses of the Jesuits. The sovereign also formed a library for the Academy, opened a school of perspective (Royal Decree of August 19, 1766), and commissioned the surgeon Augustin Navarro to instruct the students in the science of nature and the human form.{23}

In his efforts on behalf of the Academy, Mengs had the loyal assistance of Francisco Bayeu and Mariano Maëlla. The latter’s pictures are deficient in invention, in vigour of execution, and in variety; indeed his cold pearl-coloured creations have nothing to compensate their feeble and unimpressive handling and colour. Bayeu was gifted with peculiar intelligence and as an artist displayed fertility, capacity in composing a picture, and a skilful touch, but his designs lack vigour and delicacy, and his colour is disagreeable.

When Goya reappeared in Madrid in 1775, Mengs was dictator of art, and Bayeu was the Court painter. Goya’s art owed nothing to contemporary influence or example, but to these two officials he was indebted for employment and for his wife. The young Aragonese knew nothing of the bitterness of long apprenticeship; his rise in the esteem of the art world of Madrid was rapid. This, in a measure, was due to his genius, but his worldly prospects were assisted by his marriage to Josefa Bayeu, the sister of the Court painter, and by the influence of Mengs, which secured for him a commission to execute a series of designs for the tapestries woven at the Fábrica de Tapices de Santa Bárbara. This first{24} series were designed for the decoration of the dining-room and bed-chamber of the Prince of the Asturias in the Palace of El Pardo. Goya delivered the first picture on October 31, 1776; on January 26, 1778, the tenth and last cartoon was delivered.

Between 1776 and 1791 Goya executed the forty-six tapestry cartoons which now hang in the Prado, and he repainted many of his designs on a smaller scale for the Countess of Benavente at the Alameda. As late as 1802 the Santa Bárbara factory wove tapestries from Goya’s pictures, and up to 1832 some of the more favoured designs had been reproduced four times. Isabella II. presented some of these fabrics to King Leopold of Belgium, but the greater number adorn the royal palaces of Madrid, El Pardo, and the Escorial.

The designs for tapestries which Goya composed during this period of over twenty-five years form a large part of the painter’s artistic output. It has been said that these early designs do not exhibit any of the painter’s predominant characteristics, and that they reveal crudeness and uncertainty. It is probable that Goya approached the task, in the first place, with very little knowledge of either the industry or the style{25} of design required from him. Mr. Rothenstein remarks that the models in the Prado are painted ‘in so crude a key, and with so little regard for harmony of colouring, that their merit is apt to escape the attention of many students,’ while the strong reds and yellows Goya employs in them have prompted Mr. Muther to compare them unfavourably with the ‘tender delicate colouring’ of Watteau and Lancret. Certainly Goya’s designs are unequal in merit. It must be remembered, too, that often he had not the good fortune of being reproduced faithfully; while other artists employed by the factory gained much by reproduction, his work almost invariably suffered in the process. The officials at the factory objected to the elaborate and delicate work which Goya submitted, and a beautiful model (‘The Blind Man playing the Guitar’) was returned to him on the ground that it could not be successfully transferred to the threads of the warp. Goya corrected his design by exaggerating all the tints and he accentuated the figures by enclosing them in white outlines. This fact suggests one reason why Goya’s enthusiasm in the employment speedily grew cool.

We learn from the Palace archives that the officials, who were more concerned with the com{26}mercial than the artistic side of the manufacture, declared that Goya’s figures were ‘dandies and girls with so much decoration of coifs, ribbons, fal-lals, gauzes, etc., that much time and patience is wasted on them, and the work is unproductive.’ They contrived to remedy this defect by covering his figures with paintings of trees or clouds or anything else that made the tapestry easier and cheaper to produce, and this treatment was not calculated to make Goya more careful in the finish of his designs. It therefore follows of necessity that only occasionally among his later cartoons can one be found to compare with those in the first series, such, for instance, as ‘The Picnic on the Banks of the Manzanares’ and ‘The Dance at San Antonio de la Florida,’ or indeed with any of the earlier designs, which were all remarkable for the vigour and animation of the scenes, the delicacy of colouring (despite an occasional surfeit of sienna and red ochre), the strength and freedom of the drawing, and the genius for natural and effective grouping in the composition of the pictures. Goya would appear in these works to be carried away by his imagination, and he has presented to us a masterly panorama of all that is brightest and most joyous in the national customs—a panorama{27} that pulsates with life, bubbles over with spontaneous merriment, and fascinates with its irresistible gaiety. We seem to hear the bells of the pony chaise and the pleasant jokes of the wenches at the fêtes on the banks of the Manzanares; the farces of Ramón de la Cruz are translated into the language of colour. And the pictures with children—happy, roguish youngsters—reveal not only marvellous skill, but a sympathy with the poetry and charm of childhood that has not been surpassed. Zapater tells us that Goya was often seen surrounded by children in his house by the Manzanares, and his whole-hearted love of childish grace and innocence is manifested in these studies.

Among his later work as a designer of tapestry one of the best examples is ‘The Earthenware Stall,’ which in its delicacy of colouring, its skilful arrangement of transparent draperies, and its brilliant lighting, is comparable with ‘The Village Wedding,’ which Cruzada declares to be the most graceful composition of the whole collection. Here the story is told with supreme humour. The stupid and happy youth in his finest attire walks beside his fresh-coloured bride who is bedecked with finery and ribbons, a priest and the parents and friends of the young couple{28} accompany them, and the village piper marches in front surrounded by a crowd of singing, shouting, dancing children. In beauty of colouring this design is the equal of the handsome, graceful figures in ‘The Water-Girls,’ and in its mirthfulness and realism it is a companion to his illustration of ‘Blind Man’s Buff,’ which overflows with irrepressible merriment. Another notable design which is also the largest that Goya painted, is ‘El Agosto,’ a striking piece of work. ‘On contemplating this picture,’ writes the Conde de la Viñaza—who declares that it entitles Goya to be known as the Theocritus, the Virgil, and the Garcilaso of painting—‘the sun seems to burn and asphyxiate with its fire, the reapers appear to be dazed with wine, and we seem to hear the chirping of a cricket hidden in the sheaves. Of the children crying and playing on the hills of straw, some appear to be the children of Van Dyck, and others the work of the expressive hand that created the weeping Ganymede.’

The forty-six cartoons mentioned in the Prado catalogue—of which thirty-three are reproduced at the end of this volume—are now contained in the Goya Room of the Madrid Gallery. During the reign of Isabella II., Frederico de Madrazo, the{29} director of the Royal Gallery, repeatedly importuned the administrators of the Royal Patrimony to exhume the Goya designs from the cellars of the Tapestry offices to which they had been consigned, and to have them restored and housed in the Royal Museum. This request, however, was not conceded, and it remained for Gregorio Cruzada Villaamil to rescue them from the oblivion into which they had fallen. He succeeded in having the cartoons placed at the disposal of the Escorial Tapestry Museum Commission, and after being restored they were sent to the Prado. Unfortunately the works are difficult to restore and quickly deteriorate; for it was Goya’s practice to sketch his pictures with extraordinary rapidity, to surround the whole with carbon, and then trace his figures with the aid of aqua rás. Many of the studies in the Prado are covered with glass in order to preserve from total loss the canvases on which scarcely any oil has been used beyond that contained in the colours.

During these first years of his material prosperity Goya varied his work for the tapestry factory by producing genre paintings and a few portraits. He also began at this time to exercise his extraordinary powers as an engraver. As an exponent of genre he was unsurpassed, as{30} a portraitist he was excelled by Velazquez alone, but his genius is more certainly demonstrated in his aquafortis work than in either his genre studies, his frescoes, or his portraits. ‘Goya was pre-eminently fitted, both by his environment and by his nature,’ writes C. Gasquoine Hartley, ‘to be the exponent of genre.’ The truth of this dictum is patent to all who study his canvases of this period. The customs that he depicted were the customs that he loved; the subjects, the people, and the passions represented are always real. He reveals both imagination and invention in the grouping and arrangement of the scenes. The vigour and boldness of his manner is revealed in the success with which he seizes, as with a camera, the fleeting movement—the unfinished smile, the arrested gesture—and seals it upon his canvas. His scenes of carnival and of merry-makings, his representations of bull-fights, and his sidelights on the Inquisition, are living phases of the life which surrounded him and in which he found his pleasure and his inspiration. The spirit of Goya is in all these pictures. His dramatic temperament, his fierce humour, and his imagination found their outlet in the life of the period and expressed itself in these paintings in which that life is immortalised.{31}

In all that he painted Goya never lost sight of, if he did not always attain, his object of securing absolute truth of effect. Whether he is employed on a portrait, a representation of romance or diablerie, or a religious fresco, he is true to the principle explained in his own remark that ‘a picture is finished when its effect is true.’ And the truth of ‘his flashes of insight imprisoned in line and paint,’ give his work a sense of modernity which is seen in the pictures of few other artists. M. Paul Lefond declares: ‘More than any other painter of past periods he is made to be understood in our day. Something more and something better than a modern, the Aragon painter still remains a forerunner; he is still almost a contemporary of the generation to come. His manner of translating and interpreting nature is absolutely modern. He renders it as he sees it, with the comprehension of an artist of our time, daring and independent. He is more than a hundred years in advance of his century. His manner of portrait-painting is completely outside all theory of teaching; his fashion of treating frescoes is an extraordinary audacity. He has in his whole existence, without truce or compromise, been pursued by this idea of arriving at the true expression of life.{32}’

It has been claimed for Goya that his genius was arrogantly unsubjective; that he had no master and was contemptuous of all rules. Originality and independence could go no further, and it may be admitted that he was intolerant of outside influence. But the spark of genius must be fanned into flame by the magnetic influence of example, and while Goya studied nature with a passionate and jealous devotion, he glories in the debt he owes to Rembrandt and Velazquez. ‘I have had three masters,’ he wrote to a literary friend, ‘Nature, Velazquez, and Rembrandt.’ Some have tried to recognise in him a disciple of Tiepolo, and his study of the aquafortis engravings of the Venetian may well have suggested his adoption of that so long neglected method of engraving, but as we should expect, he preserved an independent attitude of mind and developed a manner quite different from that of Tiepolo. There is no evidence, in his engravings, of any admiration for Tiepolo’s style, but his admiration of Rembrandt was as sincere as was his devotion to Velazquez. Gautier finds that Goya’s work reminds one of Velazquez and Rembrandt, ‘as a son reminds you of his ancestors, without any servile imitation—or rather, more by certain congeniality of{33} taste than by any formal wish.’ ‘Goya’s love for the old masters,’ says Lafond, ‘is the best proof one can give of his sincerity. He did not think of inventing new processes; conscious that the same language is capable of a variety of expressions, he was content to master the technique of the past and to borrow from it all that best suited his individuality.’ But what he borrowed he moulded and modified to suit his own purposes; translating it into a language which was his own and in the process enlarging it with new and further life.

In 1779 Goya presented to the King his plates after the pictures of Velazquez. This series, which consisted of the portraits of Philip III., Philip IV., Margaret of Austria, Isabella of Bourbon, Prince Baltasar Carlos, the Count-Duke of Olivarez, and other etchings, are faithful though not inspired copies of the master. Goya wrote to Zapater that he had had the honour of being received by his Majesty and family when he submitted the plates for their inspection, and he adds, ‘I could not have wished them to be more pleased than they showed themselves to be on seeing them.’

Herr Valerian von Loga, who has an intimate acquaintance with and profound knowledge{34} of Goya’s etchings and lithographs, has just published in Berlin a series of thirty-two reproductions of the rarest examples of the painter’s work in these media. The explanatory notes which accompany the plates are of great interest both to the student and the collector. This writer assumes that José del Castillo, who worked with Goya for the tapestry factory of Santa Bárbara, urged him to devote some of his restless activity to the etching needle. He holds that in his earlier attempts, and particularly in ‘The Flight into Egypt,’ the technique reminds one of Tiepolo. This etching is the work of an apprentice hand, and while it is not devoid of charm, it runs on bad lines. Goya’s acquaintance with the fundamental rules of etching was so imperfect that, in the first prints of his ‘St. Francisco de Paula,’ the inscription C. A. R. J. appears turned the wrong way. It is the opinion of Herr Valerian von Loga that in almost all the plates executed at this period there is a certain emptiness and unsteadiness of drawing, while the unsuccessful handling of light and shade betrays the work of the beginner, but ‘what is new and original, and above all, characteristic of Goya, is the manner in which the whole is worked out according to{35} the painter’s mode of working. We see the artist taking pains, not to give form to the things themselves, but to their appearance. On this account outlines are omitted and contours left open, and there are no regularly-growing, flowing lines, while parallel and crossing strokes are rare. The dark surfaces are composed of a great number of short, chopped-off strokes; the entire workmanship is nervous and undecided. It is clear here that the ability of the artist was far behind the good-will, and at times too his inspiration was insufficient.’

In his copies of Velazquez Goya appears to have been the first to introduce into Spain Le Prince’s ten-year-old process of aquatinta, a process which in later times he developed to the highest perfection. In 1779 he brought out an etching from one of his own designs for the tapestry factory. His work so pleased the Prince of the Asturias, for whom it was executed, that the painter is credited with an intention of publishing all his Santa Bárbara pictures as etchings. But his growing popularity as a portrait painter now claimed his activities for more remunerative work, and for more than ten years he laid aside the etching needle in favour of the brush.{36}

We learn from a memorial preserved in the Palace Archives that the graciousness of his reception, the success of his tapestry designs, and the admiration that Charles III. had expressed for his two religious studies of ‘Christ Crucified’ and of ‘St. Francis,’ emboldened the artist to proffer himself for the position of Court Painter. This honour was denied, but he was elected a member of the Académia de San Fernando.

On January 24, 1781, Goya left Madrid for Zaragoza to assist in the redecoration of the Church del Pilar under the direction of his brother-in-law, Francisco Bayeu. The dissensions which arose out of this commission between Bayeu and Goya, and between Goya and the Building Committee, were bitter and prolonged. It is not likely that the biographers of Goya, without the facts of the dispute to guide them to a correct conclusion, would display much sympathy with a conventional, mediocre painter like Bayeu, or so nebulous a body as an archbishop’s chapter, and Zapater and Cruzada have revealed their hero in the light of a persecuted, long-suffering martyr. The vanity and envy of Bayeu and the wilful obstinacy of the Building Committee in their support of the older artist they hold to{37} have been at the bottom of the matter. But the Conde de la Viñaza has exhumed the hard facts in the archives of the Pilar Cathedral, and from these it is now clear that the indomitable independence of Goya’s nature and his impetuous intolerance of all restriction have not been taken sufficiently into account by his biographers.

From the documents which Viñaza has brought to light we learn that the frescoes which Bayeu completed in the Pilar Church, in 1776, gave so much satisfaction to the authorities that they agreed to the artist’s terms for painting the round vaults and cupolas of the church. Four years later, when the Building Committee were getting impatient for the work to be put in hand, they granted Bayeu permission to engage his brother Ramon and his brother-in-law Goya to assist in the execution of the designs which he had already prepared. On October 5, 1780, Ramon Bayeu and Goya presented these designs for the vaults. The Committee found that they were ‘inspired by the greatest taste’ and decided to proceed at once with the work. It may be assumed that Francisco Bayeu arrived shortly after to supervise the operations of his assistants, and it was not long before the disagreements between Goya and his brother-in-law{38} commenced. On December 14 Bayeu complained that Goya would not be subject to correction in the manner of his painting, and he asked the Committee that he might be relieved of his responsibility in the direction of the work, in so far as Goya was concerned. We read that ‘the Committee, taking into account that Goya had come to paint, owing in a great measure to the pressure and eulogy of Bayeu in his letters, agreed that the Building Director (Canon Allué) should see Goya and his painting frequently, and mention any defects he might notice and impress upon him how grateful he ought to be for the good offices of D. Francisco Bayeu in engaging him as his assistant.’

Although it is evident that Goya was already in revolt against the supervision which he had accepted as a condition of his employment, the trouble was temporarily overborne. From this we may conclude that the good Allué did not insist too much upon the gratitude which Goya owed to his brother-in-law. By February Goya had completed the painting of the dome, and he then submitted his studies for the four triangles formed by the arches supporting it. It would appear that the public had expressed their dissatisfaction with Goya’s compositions in the dome, and the{39} Committee complained that not only were these new designs marked by similar defects of ‘drapery, colouring, and idea,’ but one of the figures represented came short of the standard of chastity that was required in pictures of this kind. The Committee, ‘fearing to expose themselves to fresh censure and an accusation of negligence and want of care, put this matter, by reason of the confidence he had won from the Committee and from the whole chapter, under the direction and in the hands of D. Francisco Bayeu, hoping that he will take the trouble to see these studies and say whether the observations of the Committee are just in deciding that the triangles be painted in such a way that they may be shown to the public without fear of criticism.’ But when this resolution of the Committee was communicated to Bayeu, he retaliated with a tirade upon his offended dignity, and we find Allué appealing to Goya to ‘see if there be any way of arranging the matter, knowing that the Committee desire harmony, and do not wish to expose their conduct to censure, but desire only that the work be skilful and perfect.’

To this appeal Goya returned what we may describe as a characteristic letter. This epistle has been published in Spain, but no transla{40}tion has hitherto appeared in England. The letter is as follows:—

Upon the receipt of this letter, which may be left to speak for itself, the worthy and sorely tried Allué seems to have invited the mediation of Father Salzedo, who was, perhaps, the only man to whom the irascible Goya might be expected to listen. Salzedo wrote the painter a long, earnest epistle, in which he appealed to his better judgment and prudence, cited instances of humility in the life of Christ for his guidance, and demonstrated the practical advantages that would be derived from doing his work to the satisfaction of the Building Committee. The good father did not hesitate to tell his friend that he had taken up a wrong attitude towards his brother-in-law and the Cathedral authorities, and plainly exhorted him ‘with all generosity and Christian charity, to submit your studies to Bayeu’s opinion, in order to please God by your{47} humility, edify the public, and give pleasure to your friends.’ And he adds in conclusion: ‘My dictum, as your greatest admirer, is that you submit to the demands of the Committee, have your studies taken to your brother’s house, and say to him in the best manner possible: This is required by the Chapter—here they are; examine them to your satisfaction, and put your opinion in writing, doing this as God and your conscience shall dictate, etc. And then await the result.’

The foregoing letter was dated March 30, 1781. On April 6, Goya wrote a conciliatory note to Allué, promising to make fresh studies in consultation with Bayeu. Eleven days later the Committee approved the new designs and expressed their pleasure at finding him reconciled to his brother-in-law. But the truce, for such one supposes it to have been, did not last. From a minute in the report of the Building Committee’s proceedings on May 28, it is recorded that Goya, in a ‘not very courteous’ manner, had told Allué that he was only losing his reputation in Zaragoza and desired permission to return to Madrid as soon as possible: ‘The Committee resenting this further affront, resolved: First, that the Professor be paid for{48} his painting. Second, that under no circumstances would he be permitted to continue to paint any more in this Church, but that this need not deter the Director from giving some medals to his wife, in virtue of her being the sister of D. Francisco Bayeu, who was so worthy of this and other considerations from the Committee, by reason of his skilful work in this church.’

The source of the trouble was the failure of the Committee to accept Goya at his own estimate, which was certainly the true one, as the superior of Bayeu. The young painter doubtless did his best to follow the advice of Father Salzedo, but he wore the robes of humility with a bad grace, and was impatient of ignorant and pedantic criticism. His position had become untenable. The painter received his payment, his wife accepted her medals, and they left Zaragoza for Madrid in June 1781.

Goya was indulging no empty boast when he intimated, in his memorial to the Building Committee, that his renown in Madrid was widely acknowledged. He was no sooner back in the capital than the Conde de Florida Blanca sent him a royal order to paint one of the pictures for the Church of San Francisco el Grande. The favoured minister also presented him to the{49} Infante don Luis, the brother of the King and husband of Maria Teresa Vallabriga, who at once conceived a great liking for the painter. He spent a month at the palace of Arenas de San Pedro, and was entertained with great hospitality, while he executed portraits of the Infante’s family. He also painted for the Consejo de las Ordenes several devotional pictures for the Calatrava College at the Salamanca University. In his leisure hours he worked at his picture in the Church of St. Francis. This work was not completed until November 1784. The pictures were ceremoniously unveiled on the 8th of December, in the presence of the King and his court. The occasion was a triumph for Goya. Other pictures had been painted by Bayeu, Mariano Maëlla, Gregorio Farro, Antonio Velazquez, Joseph del Castillo, and Andres Calleja. But their work was eclipsed by the composition in which the magic brush of the Aragonese represented San Bernardino de Siena. The saint is shown with a crucifix in his hand, standing on a rock, preaching, by the light of a brilliant star, to the wonder-filled King Alfonso of Aragon and his court.

Great was the admiration which this picture won for the artist, but, as was usual in Spain, he{50} 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{51} 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{52} 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{53} 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{54} 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{55} 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{56} 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,{57} 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{58} 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{59} 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{60} 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{61} 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{62} 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.{63}

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{64} 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{65} 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{66} 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,{67} 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{68} 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{69} ‘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.’

The more closely one studies these royal portraits the more one becomes convinced of their truth. To-day they remain as real to us as the sympathetic, Velazquezesque likenesses of the painter Bayeu in the Prado, or of Dr. Peral in the National Gallery. It is almost impossible for any one to be in a position to award the palm for supreme excellence among Goya’s portraits, for besides being so numerous, they are widely distributed among the aristocratic families of{70} Spain, and many are practically inaccessible to the student. There are fewer than two dozen of his portraits in the Prado, only two in the National Gallery, and one in the Louvre. Few people are familiar with more than a certain number of his portraits. For this reason there are many different opinions as to the comparative merit of his pictures, but the individual opinions all constitute a remarkable tribute to the painter’s genius in catching the likeness and reflecting the character of his subjects.

Of the portrait of Villanueva, Señor Caveda writes that ‘it not only faithfully represents the features of the famous architect and the expression of him as a whole, but reveals in him the goodness of soul that animates him, and the noble simplicity of character which is so skilfully transmitted in all Goya’s impressions.’ Señor Mariano Nonqués, referring to the portrait of Moratin, now in the possession of Don F. Silvela, declares that ‘it may rightly be said without any appearance of exaggeration that this effigy is painted with the mind and with a spontaneity which is clearly seen, since there is nothing in it that reveals difficulty in the work, or any preconceived idea of imitating any other painter in its execution,’ and he adds that,{71} by reason of the individuality it discloses, it should be considered one of the best likenesses painted by Goya. According to the painter Carlos Luis de Ribera, the genius of ‘La Tirana’ may be seen in the head of the portrait of the distinguished actress, Rosario Fernandez. ‘In it, as in all his (Goya’s) works,’ says this authority, ‘there is that air of truth which so few painters have attained; there is brilliancy and freshness without pretension or exaggeration, the model is simple and convenient, and while it makes no show of strength it is not weak. Its execution springs as much from sentiment as that of all his canvases, because it was never sought after by Goya, but was the consequence and result of his spontaneity and intuition.’ Again, of his portrait of José Luis Munarriz, the eminent critic, Don Francisco Maria Tubina, writes: ‘There is something on the canvas in addition to perfection in the technique, the beautiful development of the subject and the exact likeness; the immaterial part must be recognised and appreciated—the inner vigour Goya gives the character, which illumines the features with the glow of the soul. Munarriz is represented to us in the picture as the fancy imagines him, as we see him in his biography, ingenious and lively in thought, dis{72}tinguished in form, kind and firm in temperament, prudent in judgment, and with a mind always directed upon things which elevate and ennoble. Munarriz the literary man,’ he says in conclusion, ‘is the Munarriz of the picture, the one being explained by the other.’ And read, also, what the Boletin de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones contains concerning the two portraits of Doña Antonia de Zárate, now in the possession of Señora Vinda de Albacete: ‘But where Goya shows the most exquisite sensibility and profound psychology is in these two portraits of one person, in which he incorporates the whole story of a dreamer swayed in life and death by the highest ideals, a woman of a race of poets and artists, Antonia de Zárate. Though in the first portrait he represented her smiling and in perfect health, in the second he knew her existence was undermined by a treacherous disease which was to cause her death. Never have we felt more deeply the impression of pathos than before this presentment of a soul rather than a person, before this face enveloped in transparent veils, with life showing in the eyes, and in that life a melancholy realisation of approaching death.’

Goya’s portraits, as we have said, are so numerous that it is only possible to deal here with a{73} brief selection of them. In his large and varied gallery he displays so much versatility that it appears impossible that they could all have been conceived by the same mind and painted by the same hand. His treatment is alternately rough to the verge of violence and as smooth as the work of a miniaturist; his tones are crude and heavy or luminous and glowing, as the sitter appeals to his mind; he makes his queen a confessed harlot and his little grandson the incarnation of dainty boyhood. The portrait of his wife, now in the Prado, is a work of the highest excellence, so are the beautiful representations of the Duchess of Alba, the vivid impression of Asensi, the delicious portrait of the Marquesa de Pontejos, the Gainsboroughesque study of the Conde de Florida Blanca, the equestrian painting of General Palafox, the dashing, almost contemptuously vivid likeness of Godoy, the striking portrait of Guillemardet so enthusiastically eulogised by M. León Legrange (Gazette des Beaux-Arts), and those of the Duke of Osuna, of Felix Colón, Jove-Llanos and Ventura Rodriguez, of Martincho and Romero, the bull-fighters, of Pignatelly, General Urrutia, of the royal children, and of himself, painted when still young—each portrait bears the stamp of Goya’s genius,{74} each expresses an individuality in his individual style, each is finished because its effect is true.

Goya’s portrait of the Duke of San Carlos, the most loyal friend of the son of Maria Luisa, has won the admiration of many painters and critics. The head is beautifully painted, the posing is natural and graceful, the figure lives and breathes. For this ‘miracle of art,’ as Viñaza styles it, Goya used only a few colours, which he spread over the canvas with an energetic and grandiose brush, each stroke being the expression of an æsthetic thought and the perfection of the technique of painting. The portrait, ‘which legitimises Goya’s descent from Velazquez,’ is said to be like the work of Rembrandt in its clare-obscure, of Watteau in its correctness, and of Titian in its delicacy and freshness. But there is no end to the expressions of admiration which Goya has inspired. Eduardo Rosales went to Zaragoza annually to visit Goya’s portrait of the Duke of San Carlos, and on one occasion, when he had been lifted by a friend that he might study the face of the portrait, he is reported to have exclaimed, ‘My friend, such painting will never be seen again.’

In 1798 Goya was intrusted with the decoration of the newly built church of San Antonio{75} de la Florida, which had sprung into existence in 1720 as a primitive hermitage, had been destroyed when the El Pardo road was made in 1768, was re-erected two years later, and in 1792 was replaced by the present elegant edifice, which was built at the expense of the royal patrimony, after the plans of the celebrated architect, Ventura Rodriguez. The outside of the building is of good architectural style, the interior is small and elegant, and well suited to the rank and fashion which frequented it. The Church was opened for worship on July 1, 1799, and we read that ‘Madrid went wild with excitement at the glory of Goya’s achievement.’

Don Juan de Dios de la Rada y Delgado, who supplied the text for the volume of aquafortis engravings of these frescoes which D. José Moria Galvan y Candela executed in 1897, tells us that they were wholly in accord with the conditions of the time. But the sentiment of Mr. Rothenstein is nearer to the truth when, in speaking of these frescoes, he says that he can remember nothing which gave him so clear an idea of Goya’s cynicism. ‘Imagine,’ he writes, ‘a coquettish little church with a white and gold interior, more like a boudoir than a shrine, but furnished with altar, and seats, and confessionals.{76} One’s nostrils expect an odour of frangipane rather than incense, and it must be admitted that Goya’s frescoes do not strike a discordant note in this indecorously holy place.’

The subject of the main composition covers the cupola, and contains upwards of a hundred figures considerably over life-size. The picture illustrates the miracle ascribed to St. Anthony of Padua, who restored to life the corpse of a murdered man in order that he might reveal the name of his assassin and rescue an innocent man who was about to be executed as the perpetrator of the crime. The scene is enclosed by a painted railing which surrounds the entire composition. We see the saint standing on an eminence against a luminous background. His life-giving words have just restored the corpse to consciousness. The man leans forward, supported in the arms of a companion, with his hands clasped in an attitude of profound veneration, his expressive face looking fixedly upon the saint with a gaze of surprise and gratitude. The central figures are surrounded by a motley crowd of men, women, and children, some of whom express their astonishment by eloquent gestures, while others appear indifferent to the miracle that is being performed, and one or two frolicsome{77} boys are seen astride the figured railing. On the spandrils, the intrados, the curvilineal triangles of the arches, and behind the high altar, are groups of angels and cherubs. The angels are beautifully clothed and almost wanton in their human loveliness, the babes are entirely without the illusion of divine origin. It has been said that in this composition Goya perfectly interpreted the spirit of the Church de la Florida; certain it is that these angels with ‘the skin of a camellia, eyes of fire, and the beauty of a harlot,’ which move with audacious freedom of attitude, ‘not in pure spheres of blessedness, but in an atmosphere of atoms of gold illuminated by an Asiatic sun, are the strangest and most beautiful creatures that ever adorned a consecrated house.’

‘The frescoes of la Florida,’ comments C. Gasquoine Hartley, ‘are yet another witness of the truthful humour of Goya’s insight, but not one of his countrymen realised the irreverent irony of his work.’ ‘The figures are as full of piquant intention,’ declared Richard Muther, ‘as can be found in the most erotic paintings of Fragonard.... It is an artistic can-can; it is Casanova transferred to colour. All that the Church painting of the past had created is despised, forsaken;{78} and this satire upon the Church and all its works was written in the land of Zurbarán, of Murillo.’ The Conde de la Viñaza alludes to Goya as an artist who painted pictures with religious subjects, but not religious pictures. ‘I do not know,’ he says, ‘a more profane master than this Velazquez, Rembrandt, Vicelli and Veronese rolled into one.’ And he instances his monumental painting at la Florida to illustrate his contention: ‘An admirable energy, the most splendid scale of tones. What relief! What a magic of colour! What a beautiful lesson the light of nature receives there! On the other hand, what lack of religious feeling and spirituality in those frescoes!’ And having denounced in the angels the silkiness of their skins, the brilliance of their eyes, and the wantonness of their beauty, he adds, ‘the miracles of the exemplary man of Padua are familiarly treated as a spectacle of wandering rope-dancers might be!’

It has been said that the King was incensed against the artist for introducing renowned ladies of his court in the faces of the winged archangels, and it is generally believed that the most aristocratic persons of the capital are represented in the frescoes, but if Charles IV. resented his choice of models, he had a most{79} amiable way of expressing his displeasure. Goya himself, writing to Zapater, admitted that ‘the King and Queen are mad on your friend Goya,’ but the madness took the form of a royal order, dated October 31, 1799, which reads: ‘H.M. wishing to reward your distinguished merit and to give in person a testimony that may serve as a stimulus to all professors, of how much he appreciates your talent and knowledge of the noble art of painting, has been pleased to appoint you his chief painter of the Chamber, at a yearly salary of 50,000 reals, which you will receive from this date free of rights, and also 500 ducats a year for a carriage: and it is also his pleasure that you occupy the house now inhabited by Don Mariano Maëlla should he die first,’ etc.

Certainly the frescoes in his own day were extolled as the most important work ever done by Goya’s marvellous brush; he closed the eighteenth century with creations that won for him his greatest contemporary fame and raised him to the summit of his art. If nothing could be further removed from religious inspiration, nothing human could reveal more enchanting beauty, more exquisite grace. These frescoes were praised as ‘an inimitable symphony of light and colour.’ It is not in our province either to{80} accept or to refute the claim that ‘they raise the most common things of Goya’s time to the high spheres of Spanish mystic realism.’ Goya’s contemporaries did not realise that the paintings outraged the canons of propriety and probability, and in later times Señor Rada finds that the painter, in this work, rises always to the regions of mystery, where only genius can penetrate, and responds to the peculiar influence of a temple which seems rather to inspire loving human aspirations, than mystic thoughts of infinite abstraction. ‘Apart from the fact that Goya was a believer and respectful to all that pertained to religion,’ urges Señor Rada, ‘in the principal subject of this painting (the “Cupola”) he is as manifestly mystic and delicate as any painter of the spiritual school. In the central group the risen man partakes of both realism and religious unction. The expression could not be better, nor could the attitude of the saint be more dignified. Apart from this in the other groups, he copied what he was wont to observe in popular gatherings, as he saw it, as it was, as it always will be.’

Goya’s Spanish apologists may well be justified in their contention that his originality forced him to disregard the classic rules and{81} mannerism of traditional Spanish religious art. They see no impropriety or extravagance in surrounding the figure of a revered saint with a crowd of roysterers, prostitutes, cut-purses and Manzanares rascals. And, after all, the point is scarcely worth arguing. Again, when it is protested that Goya’s archangels and seraphim were rather beautiful women than angelic spirits—well! what better conception could there be of angels than the perfections of a charming woman? That is Señor Rada’s retort: ‘The naturalist Goya, surrounded by the seductive beauty of his time, could not conceive or even presume that the chosen beings who sing eternal praises in the ethereal regions of celestial glory were any different. More in accord doubtless, with our pious traditions and with Christian spiritual belief are the glories of Juan de Juanes and Murillo; but each artist has his peculiar temperament as well as his special gamut of colour, and to ask Goya to paint angels like those great Christian artists would be the same as asking the painters of a previous epoch to paint pictures of popular scenes like Goya’s.’

The logic of the foregoing is presumably sound, although the conclusion seems to us to support those who contend that Goya’s temperament{82} rendered him an unsuitable person to translate religious episodes into colour. We remember, as Señors Rada and Pedro de Madrazo assert, that Goya was ‘a believer’ and ‘respectful in everything pertaining to religion,’ and we recall also that in their joint will the painter and his wife describe themselves as ‘firmly believing and confessing the mystery of the Holy Trinity ... and all other mysteries and sacraments, believed and confessed by our Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Mother Church, in whose true faith and belief we have lived.’ But we cannot, at the same time, forget that Goya’s detestation of the priesthood was violent and unresting. If he caught the spirit of ecstasy in his picture of San José de Calasanz receiving the Host at the hands of a priest, he also painted a representation of Santas Justa and Rufina. This picture has been described as the most profane and inappropriate work of the Aragonese genius. It is stated that he selected as his models a pair of well-known cocottes of Madrid, giving, it is said, the caustic, uncanonical explanation, ‘I will cause the faithful to worship vice!’ Goya may have called himself an orthodox conformer to the national church, but his contempt for his ecclesiastical patrons and those who practised the{83} devotions which he mechanically professed, is avowed.

But apart from their religious significance, or their lack of it, these frescoes of the Church of San Antonio de la Florida reveal Goya at his best as a daring draughtsman and fine colourist. The energy, the spontaneity, the light and the relief, the magic of his paint—all are revealed in this work, which occupied him only three months. And what better proof could one desire of the truth of his own contention: ‘In nature colour exists no more than line—there is only light and shade.’ Goya knew how to produce abundant life with simply white lead, the black of smoke, green and vermillion. Richness of colour does not consist in an infinite variety of tints, but in the harmonious variety of tones and in the skilful selection of the key in which the picture is painted. Here Goya surpassed himself in the effect he produced with a palette that was severe in its simplicity, but the processes employed by the master to obtain his wonderfully vivid and charming tones were so varied that they cannot be exactly determined. Of the result, Paul Lafond writes, it is ‘as true as Velazquez, as energetic and as light as Rembrandt, as delicate as Titian, as spiritual as Tiepolo, with{84} infinite perspectives like those of Tiepolo and Veronese, and as refined as Watteau.’

The painting of the frescoes of San Antonio de la Florida won for Goya, as we have seen, the coveted office of first painter to the Court. It was at this same time he began to paint less and to take up the needle as a new force of expression. His first work was the series of designs known as ‘Los Caprichos’ in which the spectator is transported into some ‘unheard of, impossible, but still real world’—a world peopled with dapper majas, handsome hidalgos, hideous old men and hags more horrible than the witch of Endor, gluttonous priests, spectres and sorceresses, devils and desperadoes and corpses, all the myriad diabolical and terrifying shapes and phantasies in which Goya set down his vision of humanity. The origin, the inspiration and the object of these etchings are still matters of speculation. It is generally agreed that the painter executed the first drafts for these plates after his return from San Lucar. His deafness aggravated by a serious illness, from which he made a slow and painful recovery, obliged him to give up the fatiguing work with palette and brush, and it may well be that he, whose spirit never rested and whose hand was never idle,{85} fell into a habit of preserving his impressions on paper in order to distract his tormented imagination from brooding over his sufferings. It was at a later date that he transferred these drawings on to the copper plates. It may be reasonable to assume, as some have done, that the part of philosopher which he had developed leisurely during his days at Court, as well as the vein of moralist and castigator of vice, was quickened in him by satiety and physical pain. The Conde de la Viñaza appears to believe that Goya suddenly awakened to his power as a caricaturist, and that, irritated at the moral ugliness of his contemporaries, and at the vile coterie which surrounded the King and Queen, he began to inveigh unflinchingly against lasciviousness, covetousness, rapacity, hypocrisy, and ignorance, against the court parasite and the court harlot, the miser and the monk, the women who sold their daughters and the monsters who bought them, against insolent pomp, ecclesiastical rottenness and venal stupidity. Yet probably the view of Gautier is nearer the truth. He assumes that the now popular painter was ‘merely producing so many capricious sketches, when he was in truth drawing the portrait and writing the history of Spain of former days, under the belief{86} that he was serving the ideas and creed of modern times. His caricatures will soon be looked upon in the light of historical monuments.’

Extraordinary as these pictures are by reason of their fancy, their beauty, their saturnine wit, their ‘Gargantuan spirit,’ as well as by the technical skill and originality they display, they are even more extraordinary by reason of the favour with which they were at first received by the people against whom they were directed. At first the plates were issued separately and were passed from hand to hand among the etcher’s friends. But in 1799, probably the year in which the series was completed, a prospectus was issued, advertising the publication of an edition of seventy-two plates. Goya, for unknown reasons, objected to this edition, and the issue was never made. In the meantime the satire of these tumultuous cartoons was discovered by the objects of his ridicule. Godoy, the old Duchess of Benavente, the Queen’s favourites, were the first to be identified, then effigies of the Queen herself and her illustrious lord were recognised upon the plates. The scandal of these allusions aroused an outburst of indignation, instigated, in great measure, by the caricatured and crucified clergy.{87} The office of the Inquisition was moved to take action, and Goya’s popularity and influence were powerless to avert the inevitable catastrophe. Rescue came from the most unexpected quarter. In 1803 the King caused an edition of 240 copies of 80 plates, which had already been printed, as well as the plates themselves, to be acquired by the state, with an order that he had commanded their publication.

It is difficult to account for this splendid action from such a King as Charles IV. Was he so impressed by the merits of these etchings that he was prompted to rescue them from the Inquisition in the interests of art—a magnanimity of spirit ‘of which his character gives no promise’? Probably he was merely insensible to the satire of the pictures. The ‘Caprichos’ were dedicated to the monarch by the artist—a subtle jest on the stupidity of the King, who, Muther concludes, ‘was not even in a position to grasp the meaning of the plates.’ We learn that Charles remunerated Goya by granting his son a pension of 12,000 reals. A reproduction of the letter from the painter referring to this arrangement is as follows:{88}—

{89}

The technical excellence of the Caprichos makes them comparable with those of Rembrandt, while{91} in their meaning and character they may be likened to the work of Daumier. There are the peculiar qualities of Goya’s etching, which recall the truth and naturalness of Fernando Boll, the movement and life of Lievens and Konninck, and the expression and charm of Von Vliet? These artists, whose best individual qualities are all combined in Goya, were pupils of Rembrandt. ‘Only Hokusai,’ writes Mr. Rothenstein, ‘was capable of such monstrous gaiety, such stinging satire, and he alone could have lent probability to such monstrous phantasy; Hogarth was too sermonising, Rowlandson too rollicking; a certain diabolical side of his nature, which Goya allowed to be seen both in the “Caprichos” and “The Disasters,” has probably prevented his etchings gaining a footing in England.’ Certain it is that Goya’s prints are rarely to be met with in this country—a fact that caused the writer of this book to spare no effort in order to include in the illustrations, reproductions of every etching and lithograph, as well as of every portrait or picture of Goya’s, of which he could secure an impression.

It is one thing to admire, even to understand, the technique of the ‘Caprichos,’ but to understand the precise significance of many of the{92} plates is almost impossible. Perhaps the titles printed by Goya beneath the plates are the best guide to their meaning. The only reward to be derived from reading ingenious meanings into the prints is the personal interest one finds in the exercise. The series may be divided into three classes; the first are humorous satires of the foolishness and rottenness of the life of the period; the second are scathing assaults upon the ignorance and greed of the priesthood and the corruptness of the civic institutions; and the last are visions of witches and demons, which may be classed as pure phantasies. There is a depth of meaning in every plate, for Goya reproduces for us in them not only what he has seen, but what he has felt. The first plate illustrates a marriage of convenience, and we are shown the girl-bride being presented to her hideous suitor by her more hideous mother. Over and over again we are presented with this type of the ‘complaisant mother,’ which has been described by Théophile Gautier in illuminating prose. ‘It is impossible’ he writes, ‘to fancy anything more grotesquely horrible, more viciously deformed. Each of these frightful old shrews unites in her own person the ugliness of the seven capital sins; compared to them the{93} Prince of Darkness himself is pretty. Just fancy whole ditches and counterscarps of wrinkles; eyes like live coals that have been extinguished in blood; noses like the neck of an alembic covered with warts and other excrescences; nostrils like those of an hippopotamus rendered formidable by stiff bristles; whiskers like a tiger’s; a mouth like the slit in the top of a money-box, contracted by a horrible and convulsive grin; a something between the spider and the multiped which makes you feel the same kind of disgust as if you had placed your foot upon the belly of a toad.’ The description is horrible even as Goya’s engravings are horrible, and as excellently true as the work by which it was inspired.

It is not possible in the space at our command to review these ‘Caprichos’ in detail, and fortunately it is not necessary. The reader can examine the plates for himself and study their details. He will remark the skill with which the engraver endows ‘The Garroted Man’ with its sombre, gruesome tone; the sense of the unavailing, despairing effort with which the living skeleton in ‘And yet they do not go’ (Plate 369) supports the slab of stone which must inevitably fall and crush the crouching,{94} scarcely human wretches who anticipate their fate with expressions of such lurid horror. One can feel the violence of the wind that buffets the women in ‘A Bad Night’; we enter into the terror of the woman who is employed in her hideous task in ‘Tooth Hunting.’ Here indeed, ‘horror confronts us; corruptness is imagined with an unapproachable depth of grotesqueness.’ In all the realm of art there is nothing to compare with the horror and grotesquerie of these Caprices.

Goya’s next work was the thirty-three plates of ‘The Tauromachia.’ This series of engravings was so brilliant in execution and appealed so strongly in their theme and treatment to the Spanish national affection for the bull-ring, that doubtless they would have brought the etcher even greater contemporary fame than the larger series, but for some unexplained reason, they were not publicly issued until after his death and the death of his only surviving legitimate son. In the ‘Tauromachia’ Goya made less use of aquatint and aquafortis, and, as in his later etchings, relied more and more upon the needle to produce his effects. These scenes of the bull-ring represent the different phases of the combat and the surpassing feats of its most famous{95} exponents. The ‘Caprices’ may appeal more strongly in some respects, but the drawing in the plates of the ‘Tauromachia’ is extremely light and facile, and the illusion of vigorous movement is seen in them all.

In 1803 Goya was fifty-seven years old. The corruption in high places, against which he had hurled his darts, was fast driving Spain into the grasp of the world-power which was menacing all Europe. Napoleon’s ambitious designs embraced the mastership of the Peninsula, and he was already maturing his plans to that end. In 1803 the English and French were again at war. Napoleon demanded, under the treaty of St. Ildefonso, that Spain should declare war against England. Godoy strove fiercely to resist the will of the tyrant. Napoleon ordered the dismissal of Godoy. Spain purchased her neutrality in hard cash, and Godoy was retained. In 1804 Napoleon was proclaimed Emperor, and the neutrality of the Spaniards was reduced to such a farce beneath the grinding importunities of the imperial ally that Pitt declared war against Spain in December of that year. The battle of Trafalgar was fought on October 21, 1805, but before the end of the year Napoleon had entered{96} Vienna and won the battle of Austerlitz. Before the awful menace of his growing power, Godoy sued for the favour of the conqueror in gold drawn from the Spanish funds. The Emperor accepted the money without relaxing his animus against the despised favourite, who was forced to approach England with proposals for an anti-French coalition. His overtures were ignored. The Queen and the King heaped new honours upon the Prince of the Peace, but his end and that of his august patrons was near. Ferdinand’s party was working the country into a ferment of hatred against Godoy, and Napoleon’s inflexible aversion sealed his doom. In 1807 Ferdinand truckled to the ‘Scourge of Europe’ by asking for a lady of Napoleon’s family for a wife, while Godoy urged upon Napoleon the occupation of Portugal as a preliminary to the introduction of French troops into Spain. In October 1807 Portugal proving refractory, Junot and a strong force encamped on Spanish soil and were made welcome by the Prince of the Asturias and the Prince of the Peace, both of whom regarded the invasion of the French as a friendly move, in support of their respective interests.

In the same month the Court was stricken by the exposure of the plot and counterplot planned{97} by the rascally favourite and the intriguing Crown Prince. Godoy was charged by Ferdinand with the intention of killing the King and his family and seizing the throne; Ferdinand was surprised in a plot which embraced the imprisonment if not the death of his father. The Prince of the Asturias was placed under arrest, and the King applied to Napoleon for his advice. Junot marched into Portugal; French troops poured into Spain; the Portuguese Regent, at the advice of Lord Strangford, transferred his court to Brazil. On March 17, 1808, the troops, in favour of Ferdinand, prevented Godoy from leaving Aranguez, and two days later threw him, bruised and bleeding, at the feet of the Prince of the Asturias, who gave his father to understand that, by virtue of the presence in the capital of his friends the French, he was absolute master of the situation. Charles IV. signed a decree which made Ferdinand VII. sovereign of Spain. A few days later he put his name to a private withdrawal of his abdication; and this document was forwarded to Napoleon, with a letter offering to conform to whatever the Emperor might order with regard to him, his queen, and the Prince of the Peace. Napoleon came south towards Spain. Ferdinand, who hastened north to meet him, entered Bayonne to{98} find himself a prisoner. Charles IV., with Maria Luisa and Godoy, followed to Bayonne, and Ferdinand was compelled to restore the crown to his father, who transferred it to Napoleon. The cash consideration the King was to receive for his sovereignty was never paid.

While these base traffickings were occupying the King and his family, the gallant loyalists of Madrid had risen against the French and suffered massacre on the terrible Dos de Mayo. Once again the country was in arms; the Spaniards fought—to instance only the sieges of Zaragoza and Valencia—with superb valour, but the Junta continued its servile negotiations with Napoleon, and Joseph Buonaparte, King of Naples, was summoned by his brother to rule over Spain. On July 9, 1808, Joseph I. set foot in his new kingdom. On the 17th the French were defeated in the battle of Baileu, and the victorious Spanish troops advanced over the Sierra Morena to Madrid. The new king fled the capital. Napoleon in person took command of the army which was to reconquer Spain, and advanced into the heart of Castile. The left division of the Spanish army was defeated on November 11, the right was driven into the mountains of Aragon, the centre was completely crushed at Tudela on{99} November 26. A fortnight later the Emperor entered Madrid, and Joseph I. was restored to the throne of Spain.

Goya’s position was rendered acutely difficult by these drastic changes. The first painter of the exiled King, the favourite of his dispersed courtiers, what could he do in the court of the hated Joseph Buonaparte? It may be surmised that ‘the good old Goya,’ as Gautier familiarly styles him, hated the new order of things, but he was no visionary patriot burning with the fire of useless sacrifice. His love of country was not love of Charles IV. or his son; he loved Spain not less because Maria Luisa and Godoy were out of it. And as he asked himself what action he should take, he saw the Prince of the Asturias submit himself to the new ruler, and with him Jove-Llanos, Mazarrado and Urquijo, the Dukes of Fernan Nuñez and del Parque, the Count of Santa Colonna, the Cardinal of Bourbon—to mention a few only among the nobles. Goya’s comrades also, the Court painters, Mariano Maëlla, Francisco Ramos, and Pablo Racio, acknowledged the ‘intrusive king’! Goya hesitated no longer. He took the oath of allegiance to Joseph I. He was made a knight of the Legion of Honour. He painted the usurper’s portrait, and some time{100} later accepted, with Napoli and Maëlla, the commission to select from the treasures of the royal gallery fifty of the most beautiful pictures which were to be sent to the Louvre.

But though the old order had changed and Goya had changed with it, his spirit was full of bitterness. He had witnessed the butchery and slaughter of the French soldiers; he hated the sound of the clanking of the spurs of Murat’s hussars on the pavements of Madrid.

Already he had painted two pictures, the ‘Dos de Mayo’ and ‘Un Episodio de la Invasión Francesca.’ One has only to study these two pictures of realised terror, in the Prado, to understand the painter’s hatred of the French and the brooding melancholy which the events of the rising in Madrid had fastened upon his soul and darkened his life. De Amicis, the Italian author, writes, with a fine appreciation of the stirring realism of these works: ‘Nothing more tremendous can be imagined: one can give no more execrable form to power, nor frightful aspect to desperation, nor a more ferocious expression to the fury of a fray. In the first one there is a dark sky, the light of a lantern, a pool of blood, a pile of bodies, a crowd of men condemned to death, and a line of French soldiers{101} in the act of firing; in the other are horses with their veins cut, and horsemen dragged from their saddles, stabbed, trodden upon, and lacerated. What faces! What attitudes! One seems to hear the cries and see the blood running: the veritable scene could not cause more horror. Goya must have painted these pictures with his eyes glaring, foam at his mouth, and with the fury of a demoniac; it is the last point which painting can reach before being translated into action; having passed that point one throws away the brush and seizes the dagger; one must commit murder in order to do anything more terrible than those pictures; after those colours, comes blood.’

Goya retired to the seclusion of his house outside the gates of the capital, only opening his doors to a few old friends, among whom were Cean Bermudez the art critic, Carnicero the illustrator of Don Quixote, Castillo the painter, and Selma the engraver. The old painter had become completely deaf, and, in these dark days of change and violence, the bitterness of his spirit found further expression in the ‘Desastres de la Guerra’—‘the cry of a just soul against the iniquity of warfare.’ With passionate vigour he depicted the horrors of the French invasion{102} and lashed with his satire the barbarities of the conquerors. The new series was begun in the year 1810. They reproduce all the sad and abominable events which had culminated in the accession of Joseph Bonaparte. Callot, in his scenes of the barbarities of the Thirty Years’ War, did not attain the fire, the power, or the purpose of these plates. All the horrors of warfare and its heroism and the stupidity of war are depicted here with searching truth. The technique of the plates is unsurpassed. We see starving men made bestial with terror, dead bodies stripped and mutilated, women outraged, and children butchered before the eyes of their frenzied mothers. And again we are shown the superb heroism of the women who, armed only with hatchets and stones, withstood the onslaught of the dragoons; we are made to realise the intrepid loyalty of those men and women who fought side by side on the terrible Dos de Mayo; we witness the masculine daring of the women who took the match from the hands of the dead artillerymen and continued to work the guns. Every phase of warfare, its famine and desolation, its hunger and disease, its heroism and its savagery, are depicted in this impeachment of Militarism. The utter uselessness of war is em{103}phasised in the haunting echo which runs through all the plates—‘To what end?’ The wasteful sacrifice of human lives is forced upon Goya’s audience by an engraving in this series inscribed with the word ‘Nada’ (Nothingness). Gautier in his rare volume, Travels in Spain (so rare that I need make no apology for again quoting from it), writes of this plate: ‘Among these drawings which admit of an easy explanation, there is one fearfully terrible and mysterious, the meaning of which, that we can dimly understand, fills you with horror and affright. It is a corpse, half-buried in the earth; it is supporting itself on its elbow, and, without looking at what it is writing, traces with its bony hand, on a paper placed near it, one word—“Nothingness”—which is alone worth the most terrible things Dante ever penned. Around its head, on which there is just enough flesh left to render it more frightful than a mere skull, flit, scarcely visible in the darkness of the night, a number of monstrous spectres, lighted up here and there by flashes of vivid lightning. A fatidical hand holds a pair of scales, which are in the act of turning upside down. Can you conceive anything more sinister or more heartrending?{104}’

The ‘Disasters’ were not published in a series until 1863, when the Academy of San Fernando acquired eighty plates and issued the engravings with a brief introductory note. In this introduction the writer says: ‘The collection which Goya designated by the name of Ravages or Disasters of War, is indisputably one of the most notable of the kind that he produced. In it is all the strength of his lively imagination, exalted and excited by a deep patriotic feeling in those terrible moments when an unjust foreign invasion essayed to humiliate the pride and hauteur which are a characteristic of the Spaniard. What matter for surprise then that a Spaniard, an Aragonese, a man with the stern independent character of Goya, should allow himself to be carried away very often by exaggeration and caricature?... On the other hand, this work breathes novelty in the subjects, originality in the types, fire in the composition, boldness and firmness in the colouring, decision and even fineness in the design.... In order that nothing shall be lacking in this collection, there is given on each plate the inscriptions which afford another proof of the artist’s genius. These inscriptions, concise, incisive, and piquant, add character, if that be possible, to what the pencil had already{105} accomplished; the brief phrases, at times a single word, reveal by their sense of rapidity the fugitive idea which his mind had conceived in a moment, and which, in little more than another moment, his hand had represented.’

A very interesting series of drawings and etchings are preserved in the Print Room of the British Museum. Of these ten are reproduced in this book for the first time. The Goya collection in the Museum consists of eight original drawings, a holograph letter of Goya and no fewer than two hundred and eighty-one separate works, comprising etchings and lithographs of the Proverbs, Caprices, Tauromachia, and Disasters of War, and the subjects after Velazquez. They are all in a splendid state of preservation. Of the selection made for the present volume (Nos. 601-12), the portrait of the Duke of Wellington (601) and ‘A Lost Soul’ (605), have been reproduced by Mr. Rothenstein. The sketch of the Duke, whom Goya in the letter referred to, writes ‘Weelingthon,’ served the painter in executing the large portrait. It was made on the day following the battle of Salamanca (1812), when Marmont was defeated on the field of Arapiles. The ‘Lady and Gentleman on Horseback’ (No. 602) have not been identified, although the picture{106} is evidently a portrait. The head of Fray Juan Fernanez (No. 603), drawn at the moment of his last breath, is a very powerful sketch. In No. 609 the artist depicts misery in a few masterly touches, and in Nos. 607, 608, and 609 he illustrates proverbs with his peculiar freakish fancy. The study of bulls (610) is another spirited sketch. The remaining plates represent scenes of the bull-ring.

Goya still brooded over the misfortunes which the Royal family and their hated favourite between them had brought about by folly, ignorance, and baseness; and over the sufferers, the common people, who still sacrificed their lives to reinstate their corrupt but accustomed oppressors. But the end was near. The leading patriots, assembled at Cadiz, were engaged in framing a constitution which was to mark the commencement of modern Spain. Meanwhile Wellington was driving the French troops before him—Olivenza, Fuentes de Oñoro, Almeida, Albuera, Ciudad Rodrigo, and Badajoz indicate the line of their retreat. The country was being drained and devastated to provide money for continuing the war. Joseph was providing bull-fights and shows to divert the mind of the Madrileños from the national misery. Napoleon was overwhelming his{107} brother with blame for a state of affairs which was neither of his making nor controlling. Madrid, cut off from supplies, was wasted by an appalling visitation of famine which lasted from September 1811 to August 1812, when Wellington’s liberating army reached the capital to find that Joseph had already beaten a retreat. The Napoleonic rule was over. Joseph returned to Madrid, but it was only to pack up his belongings, to loot churches and palaces and retire with the plunder to France. On June 21, 1813, Wellington met the retiring intruders at Vittoria, and Joseph, with a greatly diminished burden of treasure, barely escaped with his life. Thereafter Napoleon abandoned his schemes of Spanish conquest; Ferdinand, the prisoner of Valençay,—who had danced in captivity while his country bled, who still sought a marital alliance with the house of Buonaparte, who had slobbered his felicitations on the birth of the King of Rome and congratulated the Emperor upon his victory over the Spaniards—Ferdinand was now free to receive the welcome which his loyal countrymen were eager to give him.

Ferdinand ‘the desired,’ after swearing to respect the new constitution, re-entered Spain in March 1814 amidst an incredible outburst of{108} popular enthusiasm. Two days before he reached Madrid every member of the Cortes and every known friend of the constitution was thrown into prison. By the publication of the decree of Valencia he proclaimed himself an autocrat, by his acts he proved himself a tyrant. He re-established the Inquisition, he decreed the ancient taxes; the country, desolated by war waged on his behalf, was thrown into lamentable disorder by the greed of the coarse and ignorant bloodsuckers whom the King gathered around him. Charles IV. was a paternal sovereign, and Joseph I. was an enlightened ruler beside Ferdinand VII. Neither Liberals nor Conservatives were safe. He imprisoned the men who had striven and bled to effect his return; he persecuted without mercy those who had sworn allegiance to Joseph. Goya was one of the first and fiercest, according to Lafond, to acclaim the return of the King. For a time he sought refuge from his sovereign in the house of his friend José Duaso y Latre, who kept him in hiding for three months. At the expiration of that time he found that Ferdinand was inclined to condone his defection. It is reported that he pardoned him with the words, ‘In our absence you have deserved exile, nay worse, you have{109} merited death; but you are a great artist, and we will forget everything.’

So ‘the good old Goya’ was reinstated as Court painter, and he executed several portraits of the new sovereign. It is evident from these likenesses that the painter recognised the weakness and worthlessness of Ferdinand. He viewed his sitter in the same clear, critical, uncompromising spirit with which he had gazed on his royal parents; he painted the weak, shifty, uncultured despot as he was. The equestrian portrait of Ferdinand VII. is commonplace. His portrait of the monarch in his gorgeous mantle is almost a caricature of royalty, and in his other likenesses he betrays his antipathy to the restored Bourbon. That Goya’s palette still emitted ‘rays of prodigious art’ when he painted people who were congenial to him, is shown by many of the portraits of this period; for instance, by that of the Marquis de San Adrián, of Don Ignacio Garcini and his wife, of Don Evaristo Pérez de Castro, and by the beautiful study of Goya’s little niece, La Felicianæ, which is one of the tenderest and most delicate of all his portraits.

Another royal commission entrusted to Goya was to paint episodes of the war, especially of the siege of Zaragoza. Accompanied by his pupil{110} Luis Gil Ranz, he set out to obtain studies. Owing to the exaltation of the populace the journey is said to have abounded in incidents and perils. The language of signs which Ranz employed in conversing with his deaf master caused them to be mistaken for spies. They were forced to seek sanctuary at Renales, the pupil’s native town, where they waited until a favourable opportunity offered for their return to Madrid.

The melancholy which had settled upon Goya after the accession of the intrusive King increased with advancing age. In the seclusion of his house (the house in which he had entertained the noblest of the Court circle—the Deaf Man’s House, as it came to be called by the Madrileños) he beguiled the time by painting the walls with fantastic and gruesome visions which gave it an awesome and startling appearance. But the brilliant fancy had been obscured by the national vicissitudes he had witnessed and the haunting memories of the war obsessed his imagination. These paintings, which are now preserved in the Prado, produce a painful impression; they would seem to be the creations of a fevered brain.

In 1817 Goya visited Seville to paint the{111} picture of Santas Justa and Rufina for the Cathedral, to which reference has been made. On his return he designed a new series of Caprices, and executed many portraits and miniatures on ivory. It was at this time, too, that he made his first essay in lithography. The earliest of these lithographs is a fine brush drawing of an old woman spinning. It is signed and dated February 1819. Among the drawings upon stone that were executed about this period, the two most important are ‘Los Chiens,’ a bull attacked by dogs, and the splendid diabolical scene of a man being dragged along by demons. This last, which is in the Print Room of the British Museum, has special interest, as it is the first known wash drawing made upon the stone. M. Lefort mentions six other lithographs which were executed at Madrid before the journey to France: a duel between two people, a young woman reading to two children, a monk, a girl sitting on the knee of an old woman with other women in the background, a drunkard and a woman, and a peasant assaulting a girl.

The date of the execution of ‘Los Proverbios,’ the fourth series of Goya’s etchings,—‘the last thunderbolt of his genius,’—is uncertain. Probably they belong to those years when,{112} under the weight of distress of spirits in his lonely home on the Manzanares, he sketched the world within him as it appeared to his gloomy imagination. The plates are without explanatory titles, and their meaning is obscure. Mr. Rothenstein finds in the larger size and broader execution of the plates themselves the reason for his belief that these are the last etchings by Goya’s hand before his failing eyesight forced him to lay aside the needle. The plates were first printed in 1830. This edition was edited with little care, and in 1864 a second edition was undertaken by the Academy of San Fernando. There were eighteen of these plates, but three more, reproduced much later in L’Art, may be placed among them.

There remain several important etchings; among them the three fine and impressive plates of ‘The Prisoners’ come first in importance. In these, as Mr. Rothenstein has said, ‘Goya’s powers as an etcher and his sympathy for suffering are demonstrated in a striking and singularly direct manner.’ Beneath the prints he has written in three sentences, his last protest against injustice: ‘The safe guarding of a prisoner does not necessitate torture’; ‘If he is guilty, why not kill him at once?’ ‘So much{113} barbarity in the treatment equals the crime committed.’ The first proofs of these prints Goya gave to his friend, Cean Bermudez. The plates known as Obras Sueltas were not, as far as we know, printed in Goya’s lifetime. They show a man swinging a woman on a swing, with a cat watching her from the bough of a tree; a bull-fighter with a bull lying down behind him; and two representations of majas. They were first etched at Bordeaux, and from the somewhat crude style of the work, probably were the last prints executed by Goya.

Among several unconnected prints we may mention the superb engraving of ‘The Colossus,’ which seems like an etching at first glance and has defied the attempts of experts to explain the highly complicated process of its execution. As an illustration of Goya’s resources for producing a marvellous impression, this piece constitutes a veritable tour de force. The giant is placed in a vast landscape, and beside his uncouth might and Herculean muscles, cities and villages seem diminutive and insignificant atoms of the soil on which he rests. He is frightened into wakefulness by the morning sun which touches his mighty head and shoulders; they seem as if the summit of a{114} mountain, while his feet are yet in the shadow of night. A mysterious, pale, fantastic effect of moonlight throws a peculiar atmosphere about the figure. As we have already remarked, the process by which the effect is obtained remains inexplicable. According to a statement made by Goya’s grandson, the engraver employed a very soft metal plate from which only three impressions could be taken. One of these impressions is in the National Library of Madrid. A brilliant and rare old engraving of ‘A Blind Guitar Player,’ a large but inferior plate of a popular scene, and three etchings of religious subjects, complete the list of Goya’s miscellaneous etchings.

In June 1824, at the age of seventy-six, Goya set out for France. Before starting he painted his ‘San José de Calasanz receiving the Sacrament’—perhaps his finest religious composition. The work was scarcely dry when he sought and obtained the King’s permission to take the mineral waters at Plombières in France. The remainder of his life’s story is soon told. In Paris he made the personal acquaintance of Vernet, and found delight in the works of Gros, of Géricault, and of Delacroix. The last master did honour to Goya by copying every plate of the ‘Caprichos.’ But the full life of Paris was too{115} overwhelming for the old painter, and having obtained in January 1825 a six months’ extension of leave from the King, he settled down in Bordeaux with his devoted friends, Mme. Weiss and her daughter. In the little Spanish colony on the pleasant banks of the Garonne, he had for companions Joseph de Carnerero, the marine painter, Antonio de Brugada, the members of the family of Goicoechea, and Pio de Molina, and Moratin, whose portraits he painted. But these pictures do not represent his full powers; the colours are heavy and sometimes crude; he worked with double magnifying glasses and a stout lens. But in his engraving, and especially in his series of lithographs, ‘Les Taureaux de Bordeaux,’ which Mr. Rothenstein describes as ‘the most remarkable compositions of his life, certainly the greatest and most significant lithographs in the history of the art,’ his old powers shine forth again in undimmed brilliance.

In 1826 the feeling of home-sickness drew him back to Madrid. At Court he was received with every mark of respect. The King granted him a superannuation salary of 50,000 reals and permission to return to France, ‘in order that he may again take the baths which have done him so much good.’ His Majesty requested him to{116} sit to Vicente López y Portaña, in order that he might possess a picture of ‘the greatest painter Spain has seen since Velazquez.’ López painted ‘the good old Goya’ life-size, seated full-face, palette in the left hand, brush in the right, and wearing an unbuttoned frockcoat. The portrait was executed in a few hours, for at the second sitting Goya carried away the portrait, assuring the painter that he would only spoil the likeness if he persevered any further with ‘his niggling brush.’ It is said that he took palette and brush and essayed a portrait of López, but his hand, cold and trembling, refused to respond to the call made upon it, and the attempt was a failure.

The royal pension and permission to return to France is dated July 17, 1826. Accompanied by his grandson, Mariano, he betook himself again to Bordeaux. His declining years were cheered by the affectionate attentions of his young compatriot, Antonio de Brugada, who attended him in his infrequent strolls, suffered patiently his querulous moods, and even played to him on the piano the national airs which the old man could not hear. In one last flash of his genius Goya painted an admirable portrait of Juan Maguiro. It was his last work, and{117} beneath the signature he inscribed his age—eighty-one years.

In March 1828 a premonition that his end was near filled Goya with a strong desire to see his son once more before he died. When he heard that his wish was to be realised he wrote to his son: ‘Dear Xavier,—I can only tell you that this great pleasure has somewhat indisposed me and I am in bed. God grant that I can see you when you come, and then I shall be quite satisfied. Good-bye.—Your father, Francisco.’ Xavier reached Bordeaux on March 13. Three days later Goya had a paralytic seizure, and surrounded by his family and his intimate friends, ‘the greatest painter that Spain has seen since Velazquez,’ breathed his last.

On the following day the remains of Goya were buried in the Goicoechea family vault in the Grand Chartreux Cemetery of Bordeaux, and the following inscription was engraved on the stone:{118}—

✝
SEPULTURA
DE LA FAMILIA
DE
GOICOECHEA
——
AL MEJOR DE LOS PADRES
——
EL AMOR FILIAL
ELEVA ESTE MONUMENTO
A LA MEMORIA
DE Dn MARTIN MIGUEL
DE GOICOECHEA
DEL COMMERCIO DE MADRID
NACIO EN ALSASUA
REYNO DE NAVARRA
EL 27 DE OCTUBRE DE 1755
Y FALLECIO EN BURDEOS
EL 30 DE JUNIO DE 1825
——
ROGAD Á DIOS POR SU ALMA
——
HIC JACET
FRANCISCUS A GOYA ET LUCIENTES
HISPANIENSIS PERITISSIMUS PICTOR
MAGNAQUE SUI NOMINIS
CELEBRITATE NOTUS
DECURSO, PROBE, LUMINE VITAE
OBIIT XVI. KALENDAS MARCII
ANNO DOMINI
M.DCCC.XXVIII.
AETATIS SUAE
LXXXV.
——
R. I. P.
{119}

Goya’s remains were removed to Spain at the end of the nineteenth century. On the afternoon of May 11, 1900, the body was placed in the San Isidro Cemetery, Madrid, by the side of his old friends Menéndez Valdés and Leandro Moratin. Already in 1888 the Cortes had voted a sum of money for the creation of a suitable monument, and a magnificent cenotaph now marks the resting-place of the last great Spanish painter.

Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press

{120} 

{121} 

CATALOGUE OF THE WORKS OF GOYA

PORTRAITS

The following Oval Busts were formerly in the Palace of San Telmo, Seville:—

{147} 

HISTORICAL SUBJECTS

VARIOUS SUBJECTS

Pictures from Goya’s house presented to the Prado Museum by Baron d’Erlanger:—

PAINTINGS FROM THE ALAMEDA OF OSUNA

M. Paul Lafond enumerates twenty-three pictures formerly at the Alameda de Osuna, sold some years ago, and now dispersed.

The collection of the Duque de Montellano includes:—

DRAWINGS AND STUDIES

M. Paul Lafond enumerates:—

DECORATIVE PAINTINGS

RELIGIOUS SUBJECTS

THE TAPESTRY CARTOONS

A series of forty-six Cartoons executed by Goya between 1776 and 1791, for reproduction on tapestry. The Prado, Madrid.

THE CAPRICES (LOS CAPRICHOS)

A set of eighty engravings in aqua-fortis and aqua-tinta, executed between 1796 and 1812. A facsimile edition was published by the Artistic Library of Barcelona in 1885, and another by Messrs. Boussod and Valadon at Paris in 1888:—

Sometimes included in Los Caprichos are the following:—

THE DISASTERS OF WAR

A set of eighty prints in aqua-tinta. Published by the Academia de San Fernando in 1863:—

LA TAUROMAQUIA (TAUROMACHIA)

A set of thirty-three prints in aqua-fortis and aqua-tinta finished about 1815.

1. Hunting Bulls across Open Country in the Olden Time.

2. Hunting the Bull on Foot.

3. Moors hunting the Bull across Country.

4. Moors bull-fighting in an Enclosure.

5. The Moor Gazul is the first to fight the Bull according to modern rules.

6. Moors using their Burnouses to irritate the Bull.

7. Origin of the Banderilla.

8. Moor attacked by a Bull.

9. Spaniard wearing a Turban killing a Bull in the Arena.

10. Charles V. kills a Bull in the Arena at Valladolid.

11. The Cid spearing a Bull.

12. People hamstringing a Bull.

13. Horseman places some Banderillas without the Help of the Chulos.

14. The Student of Falces, enveloped in his Cape, plays with the Bull.

15. The famous Martincho plants Banderillas.

16. Martincho seizes the Bull by the Tail and the Horns.

17. Moors using Donkeys instead of Horses.

18. Intrepidity of Martincho at Zaragoza.

19. Similar Exploit.

20. Exploit of Juanito Apiñani at Madrid.{192}

21. Spectators killed by the Bull at Madrid.

22. The Woman Picador, Pajuelera, at Zaragoza.

23. Mariano Ceballos in the Arena.

24. Ceballos mounted on a Bull.

25. Bull being baited with Dogs.

26. Picador overthrown by the Bull.

27. Fernando del Toro in the Arena.

28. Rendon killing a Bull with one Blow at Madrid.

29. Pepe-Illo in front of the Bull.

30. Pedro Romero in the Arena.

31. Flaming Banderillas.

32. Bull overthrowing Picadors.

33. Death of Pepe-Illo in the Arena.

The plates 34 to 40 do not properly belong to the series.

34. Variation of plate No. 24.

35. Combat between the Bull and Picadors mounted on Donkeys harnessed to a Carriage.

36. Scene in the Bull-Ring.

37. Bull carrying a wounded Toreador impaled on his Horns.

38. Bull carrying dead Toreador impaled on his Horns.

39. Variation of plate No. 25.

40. Variation of plate No. 18.

41. The Bulls. A study of the animals in various attitudes.

This plate belongs to Monsieur Lucas of Paris, and does not properly belong to this set.{193}

LOS PROVERBIOS (THE PROVERBS)

Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty at the Edinburgh University Press

{195} 

PLATE 1.

THE FAMILY OF CHARLES IV.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{196}

PLATE 2.

THE INFANTE DON CARLOS.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{197}

PLATE 3.

THE INFANTE FRANCISCO DE PAULA ANTONIO.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{198}

PLATE 4.

THE INFANTA MARIA JOSEFA.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{199}

PLATE 5.

THE INFANTE DON ANTONIO, BROTHER OF CHARLES IV.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{200}

PLATE 6.

THE INFANTE DON CARLOS MARIA ISIDRO.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{201}

PLATE 7.

KING CHARLES IV.

(Ministerio de Hacienda, Madrid.)

{202}

PLATE 8.

KING CHARLES IV.

(Ministerio de Hacienda, Madrid.)

{203}

PLATE 9.

KING CHARLES IV.

{204}

PLATE 10.

KING CHARLES IV.

(Royal Palace, Madrid.)

{205}

PLATE 11.

KING CHARLES IV.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{206}

PLATE 12.

KING CHARLES IV.

(Marques de Casa Torres, Madrid.)

{207}

PLATE 13.

QUEEN MARIA LUISA.

(Don A. de Beruete, Madrid.)

{208}

PLATE 14.

QUEEN MARIA LUISA.

(Don José Lázan.)

{209}

PLATE 15.

QUEEN MARIA LUISA.

(Ministerio de Hacienda, Madrid.)

{210}

PLATE 16.

QUEEN MARIA LUISA.

(Marques de Casa Torres, Madrid.)

{211}

PLATE 17.

QUEEN MARIA LUISA.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{212}

PLATE 18.

QUEEN MARIA LUISA.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{213}

PLATE 19.

FERDINAND VII.

(Academy of St. Ferdinand, Madrid.)

{214}

PLATE 20.

FERDINAND VII.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{215}

PLATE 21.

FERDINAND VII.

(Prado, Madrid.)

PLATE 22.

FERDINAND VII.

(Ancient Collection of Eustaquio Veate.

{216} 

{217} 

PLATE 23.

DON LUIS, PRINCE OF PARMA.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{218}

PLATE 24.

THE DUCHESS OF ABRANTES.

(Duquesa de Abrantes, Madrid.)

{219}

PLATE 25.

THE DUCHESS OF ALBA.

(Don Rafael Barrio.)

{220}

PLATE 26.

THE DUCHESS OF ALBA.

(Palacio de Liria, Madrid.)

{221}

PLATE 27.

THE DUCHESS OF ALBA.

(The Duke of Alba, Madrid.)

{222}

PLATE 28.

THE DUCHESS OF ALBA.

{223}

PLATE 29.

THE CONDESA DE ALTAMIRA AND DAUGHTER.

(Marques de Cervera.)

{224}

PLATE 30.

THE COUNT OF ALTAMIRA.

(The Bank of Spain, Madrid.)

{225}

PLATE 31.

THE INFANTE DON LUIS DE BORBON.

(Marques de Casa Torres, Madrid.)

{226}

PLATE 32.

ALTAMIRANO AUDITOR OF SEVILLE.

(Marques de la Vega Inclan.)

{227}

PLATE 33.

DON MANUEL LAPEÑA, MARQUES DE BONDAD REAL.

(Don Joaquin Argamanilla.)

{228}

PLATE 34.

THE MARQUESA DE CABALLERO.

(Marques de Corvera.)

{229}

PLATE 35.

CONDE DE CABARRUS.

(Bank of Spain, Madrid.)

{230}

PLATE 36.

THE WIFE OF CEAN BERMUDEZ.

(Marques de Casa Torres, Madrid.)

{231}

PLATE 37.

J. CEAN BERMUDEZ.

(Marques de Corvera, Madrid.)

{232}

PLATE 38.

DOÑA LORENZO CORREA.

(M. Bischoffsheim, Paris.)

{233}

PLATE 39.

THE TOREADOR COSTILLARES.

(Don José Lazaro.)

{234}

PLATE 40.

DON JOAQUIN MARIA FERRER.

(Count of Candilla.)

{235}

PLATE 41.

CONDESA-DUQUESA DE BENAVENTE Y OSUNA.

(Madrid.)

{236}

PLATE 42.

DOÑA MANUELA DE ALVAREZ COIÑAS.

(Marquis of Baroja.)

{237}

PLATE 43.

FLORIDA BLANCA.

(Marquesa de Martorell.)

{238}

PLATE 44.

DON ANTONIO FORASTER.

(Don J. Millan.)

{239}

PLATE 45.

THE ENGINEER IGNACIO GARCINI.

(The Garcini Family, Madrid.)

{240}

PLATE 46.

DOÑA JOSEFA CASTILLA-PORTUGAL.

(Don Vicente Garcini.)

{241}

PLATE 47.

DON JUAN ANTONIO CUERVO.

(D. F. Duran.)

{242}

PLATE 48.

DOÑA MARIA ILDEFONSO DABALOS.

(Count of Villagonzalo.)

{243}

PLATE 49.

GENERAL DON JUAN MARTIN, SURNAMED EL EMPECINADO.

(Don Luis Navas.)

{244}

PLATE 50.

GODOY, PRINCE OF THE PEACE.

(Academy of St. Ferdinand, Madrid.)

{245}

PLATE 51.

F. GUILLEMARDET, AMBASSADOR OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC TO SPAIN, 1798.

(Louvre, Paris.)

{246}

PLATE 52.

JASPAR MELCHOR DE JOVELLANOS.

(Marquesa de Villamajor, Madrid.)

{247}

PLATE 53.

ASENSIO JULIA (‘EL PESCADORET’).

(Comtesse de Paris.)

{248}

PLATE 54.

THE MILKMAID OF BORDEAUX.

(Condesa Vinda de Muguiro.)

{249}

PLATE 55.

THE PAINTER ASENSIO JULIA (‘EL PESCADORET’).

(Louvre.)

{250}

PLATE 56.

THE MARQUESA DE LAZAN.

(Comtesse de Montijo.)

{251}

PLATE 57.

DON FRANCISCO LARRUMBE.

(The Bank of Spain, Madrid.)

{252}

PLATE 58.

THE FAMOUS BOOKSELLER OF THE CALLE DE CARRETAS.

(Don Benito Garriga.)

{253}

PLATE 59.

DON J. ANTONIO LLORENTE, HISTORIAN OF THE INQUISITION.

(Don Francisco Llorente y Garcia de Vinuesa.)

{254}

PLATE 60.

THE DUKE OF SAN CARLOS.

(Marques de la Torrecilla.)

{255}

PLATE 61.

THE DUKE OF SAN CARLOS.

(Conde de Villagonzalo.)

{256}

PLATE 62.

THE ACTOR ISIDORO MAIQUEZ.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{257}

PLATE 63.

THE ACTOR ISIDORO MAIQUEZ: REPETITION OF THE FOREGOING.

(Marques de Casa Torres, Madrid.)

{258}

PLATE 64.

THE COUNTESS OF MIRANDA DEL CASTAÑAR.

(Formerly in Montijo Collection.)

{259}

PLATE 65.

THE CONDE DE MIRANDA.

{260}

PLATE 66.

LEANDRO FERNANDEZ DE MORATIN.

(Academy of St. Ferdinand, Madrid.)

{261}

PLATE 67.

THE FAMILY OF THE COUNTESS OF MONTIJO.

(Palacio de Liria, Madrid.)

{262}

PLATE 68.

SEÑOR J. B. DE MUGUIRO.

(Condesa Vinda de Muguiro.)

{263}

PLATE 69.

THE MARQUES DE CASTRO TERREÑO.

{264}

PLATE 70.

THE MARQUESA DE CASTRO TERREÑO.

{265}

PLATE 71.

CAMARÓN.

(Doña E. Camarón.)

{266}

PLATE 72.

MUÑARRIZ.

(Academy of St. Ferdinand, Madrid.)

{267}

PLATE 73.

THE DUKE OF OSUNA, WITH HIS FAMILY.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{268}

PLATE 74.

ADMIRAL MAZAREDO.

(Don M. Hernando.)

{269}

PLATE 75.

MELÉNDEZ VALDÉS.

(Señor Suárez Inclán.)

{270}

PLATE 76.

THE DUKE OF OSUNA.

(Formerly in the Collection of the Duke of Osuna.)

{271}

PLATE 77.

THE DUKE OF OSUNA.

(? Marquesa de Villamajor, Madrid.)

{272}

PLATE 78.

THE DUKE OF OSUNA.

(M. Duniat, Paris.)

{273}

PLATE 79.

THE DUKE OF OSUNA.

(Formerly in the Palace of the Duke of Osuna, Madrid.)

{274}

PLATE 80.

DUCHESS DEL PARQUE.

(Marques de la Vega, Madrid.)

{275}

PLATE 81.

DOCTOR PEYRAL.

(National Gallery, London.)

{276}

PLATE 82.

GENERAL PALAFOX.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{277}

PLATE 83.

DOÑA ISABEL CORBO DE PORCEL.

(National Gallery, London.)

{278}

PLATE 84.

DON TIBURCIO PEREZ.

(D. F. Duran and Cuervo.)

{279}

PLATE 85.

DON MARIANO LUIS DE URQUIJO.

(Academy of History, Madrid.)

{280}

PLATE 86.

DON TOMÁS PÉREZ ESTALA.

(Countess of Cedillo.)

{281}

PLATE 87.

DON PANTALEÓN PEREZ DE NENIN.

(Don P. Labat.)

{282}

PLATE 88.

THE MARQUESA DE PONTEJOS.

(Marques de Martorell.)

{283}

PLATE 89.

DON RAMON PIGNATELLI.

(Duquesa de Villahermosa.)

{284}

PLATE 90.

GENERAL RICARDOS.

(Madrid.)

{285}

PLATE 91.

THE TOREADOR JOSÉ ROMERO.

(Madrid.)

{286}

PLATE 92.

MARQUES DE SAN ADRIÁN.

(In the Collection of the Family.)

{287}

PLATE 93.

THE MATADOR PEDRO ROMERO.

(Duke of Veragua.)

{288}

PLATE 94.

RAMON SATUE, IN 1823 (ALCAIDE DE CORTE).

(Dr. Benito Garriga.)

{289}

PLATE 95.

DON MANUEL SILVELA.

(Don F. Silvela.)

{290}

PLATE 96.

DOÑA MARIA TERESA APODACA DE SESMA.

(Don Andres Arteta.)

{291}

PLATE 97.

MARQUESA DE LA SOLANA.

(Marques del Socorro.)

{292}

PLATE 98.

GENERAL URRUTIA.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{293}

PLATE 99.

MARIA DEL ROSARIO FERNANDEZ, SURNAMED ‘LA TIRANA.’ A CELEBRATED ACTRESS.

(Academy of St. Ferdinand, Madrid.)

{294}

PLATE 100.

THE ACTRESS MARIA DEL ROSARIO FERNANDEZ, SURNAMED ‘LA TIRANA.’

(Conde de Villagonzalo.)

{295}

PLATE 101.

THE MARQUES DE TOLOSA.

(Bank of Spain, Madrid.)

{296}

PLATE 102.

THE CONDE DE TEBA.

(Don J. Lázaro.)

{297}

PLATE 103.

JOSÉ DE VARGAS PONCE.

(Academy of History, Madrid.)

{298}

PLATE 104.

DON JOSÉ DE TORO ZAMBRANO.

(Bank of Spain, Madrid.)

{299}

PLATE 105.

DOÑA ANTONIA ZARATE.

(Señora Vinda de Albacete.)

{300}

PLATE 106.

DOÑA ANTONIA ZARATE.

(Señora Vinda de Albacete.)

{301}

PLATE 107.

DOÑA LOLA ZIMENEZ.

(M. Chiramy, Paris.)

{302}

PLATE 108.

DON EVARISTO PEREZ DE CASTRO, PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL OF CASTILE.

(Louvre, Paris.)

{303}

PLATE 109.

DON JUAN JOSÉ MATEO ARIAS DAIRLA.

(Marquesa de Almaguer.)

{304}

PLATE 110.

FATHER LASCANAL.

(Don J. Lázaro.)

{305}

PLATE 111.

DON RAMON DE POSADA Y SOTO.

(Don Jose Maria Perez Caballero.)

{306}

PLATE 112.

MARQUESA DE CABALLERO.

(Marques de Corvera, Madrid.)

{307}

PLATE 113.

THE CONDE DE GAZINZA.

(Marques de Casa Torres, Madrid.)

{308}

PLATE 114.

MORATIN.

(Don F. Silvela.)

{309}

PLATE 115.

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST, BY HIMSELF.

(Academy of St. Ferdinand, Madrid.)

{310}

PLATE 116.

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST, BY HIMSELF.

(D. A. Pidal.)

{311}

PLATE 117.

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST, BY HIMSELF.

{312}

PLATE 118.

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST, BY HIMSELF.

(M. Leon Bonnet.)

{313}

PLATE 119.

GOYA AT THE AGE OF 80, BY VINCENTE LOPEZ.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{314}

PLATE 120.

DON J. B. DE GOICOECHEA.

(Don Felipe Modet.)

{315}

PLATE 121.

GOYA’S GRANDSON.

(Marques de Alcañices.)

{316}

PLATE 122.

DOÑA FELICIANA BAYEU.

(D. C. Ferriz.)

{317}

PLATE 123.

DON JUAN MARTIN DE GOICOECHEA.

(Marques de Casa Torres, Madrid.)

{318}

PLATE 124.

DOÑA NARCISA BARAÑONA DE GOICOECHEA.

(Don Felipe Modet.)

{319}

PLATE 125.

DOÑA JUANA GALARZA DE GOICOECHEA.

(Marques de Casa Torres, Madrid.)

{320}

PLATE 126.

THE PAINTER, FRANCISCO BAYEU, BROTHER-IN-LAW OF GOYA.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{321}

PLATE 127.

JOSEFA BAYEU, GOYA’S WIFE.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{322}

PLATE 128.

GROUP OF HEADS.

(Formerly in the Palace of San Telmo, now in the Collection of the Comtesse de Paris.)

{323}

PLATE 129.

PORTRAIT STUDY OF A WOMAN.

{324}

PLATE 130.

PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG GIRL.

(Private Property.)

{325}

PLATE 131.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY.

{326}

PLATE 132.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY.

(Conde de Peñalvez.)

{327}

PLATE 133.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY.

(Don José Lázaro.)

{328}

PLATE 134.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY.

(Don A. de Beruete.)

{329}

PLATE 135.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY.

(Don A. de Beruete.)

{330}

PLATE 136.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY.

(Don A. de Beruete.)

{331}

PLATE 137.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY.

(Don R. Garcia.)

{332}

PLATE 138.

PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN.

(Louvre, Paris.)

{333}

PLATE 139.

A LITTLE GIRL.

(Marques de Casa Torres, Madrid.)

{334}

PLATE 140.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY.

(Don J. Gutierrez Martin.)

{335}

PLATE 141.

YOUNG SPANISH WOMAN.

(Louvre, Paris.)

{336}

PLATE 142.

PORTRAIT OF A MAN.

(Private Collection.)

{337}

PLATE 143.

THE OLD MAN.

(Conde de Da. Marina.)

{338}

PLATE 144.

PORTRAIT OF AN ARCHITECT.

{339}

PLATE 145.

PORTRAIT OF A DOCTOR.

{340}

PLATE 146.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY.

{341}

PLATE 147.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY.

{342}

PLATE 148.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY.

{343}

PLATE 149.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY.

{344}

PLATE 150.

PORTRAIT OF A MAN.

{345}

PLATE 151.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY.

(Señor Orossen.)

{346}

PLATE 152.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY.

{347}

PLATE 153.

PORTRAIT OF A GENTLEMAN.

{348}

PLATE 154.

CHARLES IV.

(Comtesse de Paris.)

{349}

PLATE 155.

QUEEN MARIA LUISA.

(Comtesse de Paris.)

{350}

PLATE 156.

THE INFANTA ISABEL, AFTERWARDS QUEEN OF THE TWO SICILIES, AT THE AGE OF 12 YEARS.

(Comtesse de Paris.)

{351}

PLATE 157.

PORTRAIT OF A MAN.

{352}

PLATE 158.

DON FELIX COLON, SPANISH AUTHOR.

(Don Ricardo Traumann, Madrid.)

{353}

PLATE 159.

(FRAGMENT) DON FELIX COLON, SPANISH AUTHOR.

(Don Ricardo Traumann, Madrid.)

{354}

PLATE 160.

PORTRAIT OF A MAN.

{355}

PLATE 161.

PORTRAIT OF A BOY.

{356}

PLATE 162.

PORTRAIT OF A BOY.

{357}

PLATE 163.

PORTRAIT OF A BOY.

{358}

PLATE 164.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY.

{359}

PLATE 165.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY.

{360}

PLATE 166.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY.

{361}

PLATE 167.

PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG LADY.

(Mons. C. G., Paris.)

{362}

PLATE 168.

EPISODE OF THE FRENCH INVASION OF 1808. THE STRUGGLE IN THE PUERTA DEL SOL BETWEEN THE CITIZENS AND THE CAVALRY OF THE IMPERIAL GUARD.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{363}

PLATE 169.

ATTACK ON MURAT’S CAVALRY BY THE PEOPLE OF MADRID MAY 2ND, 1808 (SKETCH).

(Duquesa de Villahermosa.)

{364}

PLATE 170.

CASTING BULLETS BY MOONLIGHT IN THE HILLS OF TARDIENTA.

(Royal Palace, Madrid.)

{365}

PLATE 171.

SCENES OF THE 2ND MAY 1808: A GROUP OF CITIZENS OF MADRID BEING SHOT BY THE TROOPS OF MURAT.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{366}

PLATE 172.

BATTLE-SCENE.

(Marques de Casa Torres, Madrid.)

{367}

PLATE 173.

MANUFACTURING POWDER IN THE SIERRA DE TARDIENTA.

(Royal Palace, Madrid.)

{368}

PLATE 174.

THE TRIBUNAL OF THE INQUISITION.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{369}

PLATE 175.

THE PROCESSION OF FLAGELLANTS.

(Academy of St. Ferdinand, Madrid.)

{370}

PLATE 176.

A MEETING OF THE COMPANY OF THE PHILIPPINES {371}PRESIDED OVER BY FERDINAND VII.

PLATE 177.

THE CITY OF MADRID: AN ALLEGORY.

(The Corporation of Madrid.)

{372}

PLATE 178.

MUSIC: AN ALLEGORY.

(Don Luis Navas.)

{373}

PLATE 179.

SPAIN MAKING HISTORY.

(Don Luis Navas.)

{374}

PLATE 180.

THE MADHOUSE.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{375}

PLATE 181.

THE MAJAS OF THE BALCONY.

(Collection of the Duque de Marchesa.)

{376}

PLATE 182.

THE MAJAS OF THE BALCONY.

(Repetition of the Foregoing, with Variations.)

{377}

PLATE 183.

THE MAJAS OF THE BALCONY.

(Repetition of the Foregoing, with Variations.)

{378}

PLATE 184.

LA MAJA (NUDE).

(Prado, Madrid.)

{379}

PLATE 185.

LA MAJA (CLOTHED).

(Prado, Madrid.)

{380}

PLATE 186.

THE KNIFE-GRINDER.

(Budapest.)

{381}

PLATE 187.

THE WATER-CARRIER.

(Budapest.)

{382}

PLATE 188.

OLD AGE

(Lille Museum.)

{383}

PLATE 189.

ROBBERY OF A COACH.

(Marques de Castro Serna.)

{384}

PLATE 190.

BRIGANDS.

(Marques de la Romana.)

{385}

PLATE 191.

BRIGAND MURDERING A WOMAN.

(Marques de la Romana.)

{386}

PLATE 192.

BRIGANDS STRIPPING THEIR CAPTIVES.

(Marques de la Romana.)

{387}

PLATE 193.

MURDER BY BRIGANDS.

(Marques de la Romana, Madrid.)

{388}

PLATE 194.

BRIGANDS’ CAVE

(Marques de la Romana, Madrid.)

{389}

PLATE 195.

GOYA AND THE DUCHESS OF ALBA.

(Marques de la Romana.)

{390}

PLATE 196.

THE PLAGUE TERROR.

(Marques de la Romana.)

{391}

PLATE 197.

THE MONK’S VISIT.

(Marques de la Romana.)

{392}

PLATE 198.

A MASQUERADE.

(Duquesa de Villahermosa, Madrid.)

{393}

PLATE 199.

THE DANCE.

(Marques de la Torrecilla.)

{394}

PLATE 200.

THE FUNERAL OF THE SARDINE: CARNIVAL SCENE.

(Academy of St. Ferdinand, Madrid.)

{395}

PLATE 201.

THE BOOTH AT THE FAIR.

(Marques de Castro Serna.)

{396}

PLATE 202.

THE GREASY POLE.

(Marques de Castro Torres.)

{397}

PLATE 203.

THE BONFIRE.

(Conde de Villagonzalo.)

{398}

PLATE 204.

NOCTURNAL SCENE.

(Marques de la Romana.)

{399}

PLATE 205.

THE PICNIC.

(Marques de la Torrecilla.)

{400}

PLATE 206.

THE INUNDATION.

(Marques de Castro Serna.)

{401}

PLATE 207.

THE VILLAGE ON FIRE.

(Marques de Castro Serna.)

{402}

PLATE 208.

CAPRICE.

(Doña C. Berganza de Martin.)

{403}

PLATE 209.

CAPRICE.

(Doña C. Berganza de Martin.)

{404}

PLATE 210.

CAPRICE.

(Don A. Pidal.)

{405}

PLATE 211.

DOGS AND GUNS: DESIGN FOR TAPESTRY.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{406}

PLATE 212.

A DEAD BIRD.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{407}

PLATE 213.

DEAD BIRDS.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{408}

PLATE 214.

A PICADOR ON HORSEBACK.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{409}

PLATE 215.

PICADOR AND BULL.

(Marques de Baroja, Madrid.)

{410}

PLATE 216.

DEATH OF THE PICADOR.

(Paris.)

{411}

PLATE 217.

A BULL-FIGHT.

(Bequeathed to the Royal Academy.)

{412}

PLATE 218.

A BULL ESCAPED FROM THE ARENA.

(Duque de Veragua.)

{413}

PLATE 219.

MEETING OF WITCHES.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{414}

PLATE 220.

GALICIAN SHEPHERDS FIGHTING.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{415}

PLATE 221.

THE PROCESSION.

(Conde de Candilla.)

{416}

PLATE 222.

CAPRICE.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{417}

PLATE 223.

THE FATES.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{418}

PLATE 224.

SATURN DEVOURING ONE OF HIS CHILDREN.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{419}

PLATE 225.

JUDITH AND HOLOFERNES.

(Prado, Madrid.)

{420}