Goya

Victoria Charles

• Publisher: Parkstone International
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781844840311
• eBook ISBN: 9781781605981
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Techniques

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

Table of contents

• 1. Self-portrait, 1773-74.
• 2. Portrait of Martin Zapater, 1797.
• 3. Farnese Hercules,
• 4. Self-portrait, 1815.
• 5. Portrait of Josefa Bayeu (?), about 1798.
• 6. Prince Balthasar Carlos, 1778.
• 7. Self-portrait in the Studio, 1793-95.
• 8. Portrait of Charles III in Hunting Costume, 1787.
• 9. The Family of the Infante Don Luis, 1784.
• 10. Portrait of the Count of Floridablanca and Goya, 1784.
• 11. Charles IV, 1789.
• 12. Maria Luisa, 1789.
• 13. The Family of Charles IV, 1800-01.
• 14. The Countess of Chinchón, 1800.
• 15. Half Don Manuel Godoy as Commander in the 'War of the Oranges', about 1801.
• 16. Ferdinand VII, 1814.
• 17. Countess-Duchess of Benavente, 1785.
• 18. Duchess of Alba, 1797.
• 19. Dona Isabel de Porcel, 1804-05.
• 20. Adoration of the Name of God by Angels, 1772.
• 21. Betrothal of the Virgin, 1774.
• 22. St Bernardine of Siena preaching before Alfonso V of Aragon, 1781-83.
• 23. Mary, Queen of Martyrs, 1780-81.
• 24. Miracle of St Anthony of Padua, 1798.
• 25. The Crucifixion, 1780.
• 26. Saints Justa and Rufina, 1817.
• 27. Last Communion of St Joseph of Calasanz, 1819.
• 28. Agony in the Garden, 1819.
• 29. La Tauromaquia (The Art of Bullfighting), 1816.
• 30. The Bullfight, 1812-19.
• 31. Dancing by the River Manzanares, 1777.
• 32. Hunter loading his gun, 1812-23.
• 33. The Picnic, 1776.
• 34. The Parasol, 1777.
• 35. Summer (Harvesting), 1786-87.
• 36. Spring (The Flowergirls), 1786-87.
• 37. Autumn (The Vintage), 1786-87.
• 38. Winter (The Snow Tempest), 1786-87.
• 39. La Gallina Ciega (Blind Man's Buff), 1788-89.
• 40. The Meadow of San Isidro, 1788.
• 41. The Wedding, 1791-1792.
• 42. Las Gigantillas (Little Giants), 1791-92.
• 43. The Swing, 1787.
• 44. Highwaymen Attacking a Coach, 1787.
• 45. Nude Maja, 1798-1805.
• 46. Clothed Maja, 1798-1805.
• 47. Marquise of Santa Cruz, 1805.
• 48. Wounded Mason, 1786-87.
• 49. Milkgirl from Bordeaux, 1825-27.
• 50. El Maragato Points A Gun on Friar Pedro, about 1806-07.
• 51. Friar playing the guitar, from ‘Album H”, 1824-28,
• 52. Use of a pulley, ‘Album F56’,
• 53. Inquisition Scene, 1812-19.
• 54. Los desastres de la guerra (Disasters of War), 1810-20.
• 55. The Colossus, about 1808-12.
• 56. Cannibals Gazing At Their Victims, about 1800-08.
• 57. Second of May, 1808, 1814.
• 58. Third of May, 1808, 1814.
• 59. Corral de Locos (Yard with Lunatics), 1793-94.
• 60. L'Aquelarre (The Witches' Sabbath), 1797-98.
• 61. Saturn Devouring His Children, 1820-23.
• Biography
• 62. Pilgrimage to San Isidro, 1820-23.
• 63. The Dog, 1820-23.
• 64. Fantastic Vision or Asmodea, 1820-23.
• 65. Promenade of the Holy Office, 1821-23.