Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was born in Fuendetodos in 1740, a town near Zaragoza in northeastern Spain. Shortly after, his family moved to nearby Zaragoza and there he spent the first years of his life. At the age of 14, he was apprenticed to José Luzanan, an artist and friend of his father. He would later continue his art studies in Italy before returning to Zaragoza in 1771, where he got a job painting frescoes in the city’s cathedral. This work, done in the classical rococo style, established an excellent reputation for Goya as an artist and laid the foundation for much of his later success. In 1773 Goya married Josefa Bayeu, the sister of local artist Francisco Bayeu.
From 1775 to 1792, Goya would work for the Royal Tapestry Factory in Madrid helping to paint the designs. The work served as an excellent means of broadening Goya’s horizons and developing him as an artist; his studies of Velásquez’s work also influenced his style, giving Goya a slightly freer hand in painting him with a greater imagination. In 1786 Goya was appointed painter to the King and only three years later he was appointed court painter. During this period, Goya painted Charles IV and Ferdinand VII and also gained much respect as a portraitist for the aristocracy.
Tragedy would befall Goya in 1792 when he contracted a serious illness that caused him to lose his hearing. Modern scientists believe that he may have had something to do with the large amount of lead in the paints available at the time. Still, a rather paranoid individual, Goya’s deafness caused him to withdraw even further from the world. In 1799 he completed some of his most famous works, a collection of 80 engravings entitled “Los Caprichos”. The works were a crude collection, lampooning human weakness and Goya’s own mental struggle is captured in them. Among his other great works of the time are “The Naked Maja” and “The Clothed Maja”. The first painting was received with general indignation by the Spanish court, so Goya made another painting of the same scene but without the nudity. Both are now seen as seminal works.
Goya became increasingly reclusive, retreating to his Madrid villa, “Quinto del Sordo” (House of the Deaf), as the Napoleonic Wars raged. When Bonaparte’s troops seized power in Spain, Goya produced some of his most outspoken and challenging works on the subject of war; the most famous painting of the time is the brutal “The Disasters of War”. It shows the atrocities of some of the French soldiers and also shows the spirit and resistance of the Spanish people. Goya had seen the devastation of Zaragoza firsthand; he was also in Madrid when 20,000 people were claimed by the famine, so he had seen these atrocities in front of him.
However, Goya’s most disturbing work was yet to come, between 1819 and 1923 he made 14 works that are now known as the “Black Paintings”. Madness, insanity, and fantasy are recurring themes throughout the series in which Goya used much less color and a much darker palette overall. The most brutal painting of the time is, without a doubt, “Saturn devouring his son”, a representation of the God devouring his offspring in a bloody way. Other revealing paintings in the series are “The Great Billy Goat” and “Fight with Cudgels”, all of which speak to Goya’s haunted state of mind at the time, he had been lucky enough to survive two near-fatal illnesses and lived in fear. of a relapse. Goya eventually died at the age of 82 in self-imposed exile in Bordeaux.
Today the best place to see his work is the Prado Museum in Madrid. Today the best place to see his work is the Prado Museum in Madrid. Goya’s work earned him the title “the father of the moderns” and his influence on contemporary painters can be traced to his keen observational style and his tendency to paint as he saw, with little regard for beauty. conventional.