Acenturybefore 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 painterthrough 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 ofthe 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:
’ ... earth’s womb has borne in vainNew things, and never this best thing again;Borne days and men, borne fruits and wars and wine,Seasons and songs but no song more like mine.’
’ ... earth’s womb has borne in vainNew things, and never this best thing again;Borne days and men, borne fruits and wars and wine,Seasons and songs but no song more like mine.’
’ ... earth’s womb has borne in vainNew things, and never this best thing again;Borne days and men, borne fruits and wars and wine,Seasons and songs but no song more like mine.’
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 CharlesII., 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 ofVelazquez 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 CharlesII.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 CharlesIII., 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—whosepaintings 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 CharlesIII.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 CharlesIV., 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 corruption, 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 CharlesIV.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 FerdinandVII.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 CharlesIII.; CharlesIV.appointed himPintor de Cámara del Rey; he took the oath of allegiance to Joseph Buonaparte and painted the usurper’s portrait; FerdinandVII., 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 atthe 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 FerdinandVII.to the throne. ‘What did such changes matter in years of irretrievable ruin?’ writes C. Gasquoine Hartley, inA 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 artistpar 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.
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.
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, recallingthe 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. GasquoineHartley, ‘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 theEscorial. 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 BenedictXIV.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.
The Conde de la Viñaza in hisLifeof 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 theMercure de Franceof 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 theArchives 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 leregard 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. Thefresco 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 minutein 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 thecinque-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 ascendingto 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 hisgenrepictures 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 usedtheir 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 LouisXVI.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 exclusive, 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,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 compositions 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. CharlesIII.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.
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 firstseries 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. IsabellaII.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 styleof 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 commercial 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 panoramathat 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 coupleaccompany 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 IsabellaII., Frederico de Madrazo, thedirector 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 ofaqua 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 producinggenrepaintings and a few portraits. He also began at this time to exercise his extraordinary powers as an engraver. As an exponent ofgenrehe was unsurpassed, asa portraitist he was excelled by Velazquez alone, but his genius is more certainly demonstrated in hisaquafortiswork than in either hisgenrestudies, 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 ofgenre.’ 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.
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 ordiablerie, 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.’
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 oftaste 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 PhilipIII., PhilipIV., 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 knowledgeof 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 tothe 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.
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 CharlesIII.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 tohave 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-lawcommenced. 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 theCommittee 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 translation has hitherto appeared in England. The letter is as follows:—