Francisco Goya

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was born on March 30, 1746, in Fuendetodos, a small village in Aragon, northeastern Spain ^[1]. His father, José Benito de Goya, worked as a gilder, applying gold leaf to altarpieces and other church furnishings, and his mother, Gracia de Lucientes, came from a family of minor rural gentry. The family soon moved to Zaragoza, the Aragonese capital, where the boy attended school and grew up in modest circumstances ^[2].

At about fourteen, Goya entered the Zaragoza workshop of José Luzán, a local painter trained in Naples, where he spent roughly four years copying prints and learning the fundamentals of drawing ^[1]. The apprenticeship was conventional, and so were his early ambitions. He twice submitted work to the competitions of the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, in 1763 and 1766, and failed both times ^[2].

Rather than give up, he paid his own way to Italy around 1770. In Rome he studied the works he could not see in Spain, and in 1771 he earned an honorable mention in a painting competition held by the Academy of Parma ^[3]. The Italian trip gave him credentials that Madrid had denied him. Returning to Zaragoza that same year, he won his first significant commission: frescoes for a vault of the basilica of El Pilar, a project that established his reputation in Aragon ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Francisco Goya before his court career finds the answer in tapestry cartoons. In 1773 he married Josefa Bayeu, sister of the painter Francisco Bayeu, whose connections helped bring Goya to Madrid ^[1]. From 1775 he produced full-scale painted designs for the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Bárbara, eventually completing more than sixty cartoons showing picnics, games, festivals, and street scenes of contemporary Madrid life ^[3]. The commissions taught him to compose lively figure groups and to observe ordinary Spaniards with a sharp, sympathetic eye.

Recognition followed in steps. The Royal Academy of San Fernando, which had twice rejected him, elected him a member in 1780 ^[2]. In 1786 he was appointed painter to King Charles III, and in 1789, shortly after Charles IV came to the throne, he was promoted to court painter ^[1]. Portrait commissions from aristocrats, ministers, and financiers poured in, and Goya became the most fashionable portraitist in Spain.

His portraits of the 1780s and 1790s combined the shimmering handling of fabric he admired in Velázquez, whose works he had etched in 1778, with an unusual frankness about his sitters' faces ^[3]. He flattered no one excessively. That honesty, far from harming his career, seems to have been part of his appeal to a court society that prized his ability to make paint feel alive.

A severe illness in 1792 and 1793 changed both the man and the art. Goya survived, but the disease, never conclusively diagnosed, left him permanently and totally deaf at forty-six ^[1]. During his convalescence he began painting small uncommissioned works on tin, scenes of shipwrecks, fires, madhouses, and bandits, telling the Academy that these inventions allowed observations that commissioned works could not accommodate ^[2].

Among Francisco Goya achievements, the print series occupy a special place. In 1799 he published Los Caprichos, eighty aquatint etchings satirizing superstition, ignorance, vanity, and the abuses of clergy and aristocracy ^[3]. The most famous plate, showing a sleeping figure beset by owls and bats, carries the inscription that the sleep of reason produces monsters. The set was withdrawn from sale quickly, and Goya later ceded the plates to the crown, possibly to forestall trouble with the Inquisition ^[1].

The same year he was named First Court Painter, the highest artistic post in Spain, and in 1800 and 1801 he painted the group portrait of the family of Charles IV, an unsparing image of the royal household now in the Prado ^[2]. From about 1797 to 1800 he also produced the paired canvases known as the Clothed Maja and the Naked Maja. The nude, painted for the private collection of the minister Manuel Godoy, later brought Goya before the Inquisition in 1815 to answer for its indecency ^[3].

War produced his most searing work. After Napoleon's armies occupied Spain in 1808, Goya witnessed the violence of the Peninsular War and recorded it in the etchings called The Disasters of War, more than eighty plates made between roughly 1810 and 1820 and considered too dangerous to publish in his lifetime; they first appeared in 1863 ^[4]. In 1814 he painted The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808, the latter showing French soldiers executing Madrid civilians by lantern light, a picture that reshaped how European art depicted war ^[1].

Goya and Josefa Bayeu were married for nearly forty years, until her death in 1812 ^[2]. The couple endured repeated losses: of their many children, only one son, Javier, born in 1784, survived to adulthood ^[1]. Goya doted on Javier and later on his grandson Mariano, providing for both with the wealth his court career generated.

Deafness reshaped his social world after 1793. He communicated through writing and sign, and contemporaries noted that isolation sharpened his powers of observation ^[3]. His friendship with the Duchess of Alba, whom he painted several times in the 1790s and with whom he stayed at her Andalusian estate in 1796 and 1797 after her husband's death, has generated two centuries of speculation about a romantic attachment, though no documentary proof of an affair exists ^[2].

In his final decades his companion was Leocadia Weiss, a distant relative by marriage who was separated from her husband. She kept his household from about 1815, and she and her daughter Rosario accompanied him to France in his last years ^[4]. Goya was fond of hunting, bullfights, and popular Madrid entertainments, tastes that fed directly into his art, including the 1816 print series La Tauromaquia on bullfighting ^[3].

The restoration of Ferdinand VII in 1814 brought an absolutist regime that Goya, who had painted for the French-installed government of Joseph Bonaparte, had reason to fear. He was investigated and cleared of collaboration, and he kept his court salary, but he received few royal commissions after the war ^[1]. He turned inward.

In 1819 he bought a country house outside Madrid known as the Quinta del Sordo, the villa of the deaf man, a name it carried from a previous owner ^[2]. That year another grave illness nearly killed him; his doctor, Eugenio Arrieta, saved him, and Goya painted a double portrait of himself with Arrieta in gratitude. Between about 1820 and 1823 he covered the walls of the house with the fourteen murals now called the Black Paintings, private images of witches' sabbaths, pilgrimages, fighting men, and the god Saturn devouring his son, painted for no audience but himself ^[4]. They were transferred to canvas in the 1870s and are now in the Prado.

Politics forced a final move. When French troops restored Ferdinand's absolute rule in 1823 and liberals faced persecution, Goya obtained leave from the king and settled in Bordeaux in 1824, joining a community of Spanish exiles ^[1]. Even in his late seventies he kept working, experimenting with the new medium of lithography in the set of bullfight prints called The Bulls of Bordeaux and painting miniatures on ivory. He died in Bordeaux on April 16, 1828, at the age of eighty-two ^[2]. His remains were moved to Madrid in 1919 and rest in the hermitage of San Antonio de la Florida, beneath frescoes he had painted in 1798 ^[3].

Any Francisco Goya biography ends with a paradox: the last of the old masters became the first of the moderns. That description, repeated by generations of critics, captures how his work bridges the court tradition of Velázquez and the personal, psychological art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ^[3]. Édouard Manet studied him closely; the firing squad of The Third of May echoes through Manet's Execution of Maximilian and, more than a century later, through Picasso's Guernica ^[4].

His prints traveled even further than his paintings. Los Caprichos and The Disasters of War influenced the Romantics, the Expressionists, and the Surrealists, and the Disasters remain a foundational document of war reporting in visual form, made by an eyewitness who refused both heroism and propaganda ^[4]. Photographers and printmakers covering later conflicts have repeatedly cited the series as a model of moral witness.

Today the Museo del Prado in Madrid holds the largest collection of his work, including the Black Paintings, the Majas, and the royal portraits, while major holdings exist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and other institutions ^[2]. Among the most cited Francisco Goya facts is the sheer range of his output: roughly 700 paintings, nearly 300 prints, and many hundreds of drawings produced across six decades ^[1]. Spain's national prizes for film, the Goya Awards, carry his name, a measure of how completely he has come to represent Spanish art itself ^[3].