Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes is one of the most important painters in history: with him eighteenth-century art ends and modern art begins. In his long life he was an elegant court portraitist and a merciless witness to war, superstition and madness.
Training and the court
He was born on 30 March 1746 at Fuendetodos, a village near Zaragoza, where he trained. After a journey to Italy he moved to Madrid in 1775, where he worked for the Royal Tapestry Factory, drawing over sixty tapestry cartoons with cheerful scenes of popular life: picnics, games, festivals, the famous Parasol. In Zaragoza he frescoed domes of the basilica of El Pilar. His career was swift: in 1789 he became painter of the chamber to Charles IV and in 1799 first court painter. The great group portrait The Family of Charles IV (1800) shows the royals with a realism many have read as ironic.
From the same period come the two Majas, the naked and the clothed, one of the rare secular female nudes in Spanish art, which earned him an Inquisition trial.
The Caprichos and deafness
In 1792-1793 a serious illness left him completely deaf. From then on his art became more personal and restless. In 1799 he published the Caprichos, eighty etchings satirising vices, superstition, clergy and nobility; the most famous, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, has become a symbol of the Enlightenment and its shadows.
War
Napoleon's invasion in 1808 and the War of Independence marked him deeply. In 1814 he painted The Second of May 1808, the rising of the people of Madrid against the French Mamluks, and The Third of May 1808, the execution of patriots on Príncipe Pío hill: the man in a white shirt with his arms spread before the rifles is one of the most powerful images in all painting. The 82 etchings of the Disasters of War, published only in 1863, show without rhetoric the atrocities committed by both sides.
The Black Paintings and exile
In 1819 he bought a house outside Madrid, the Quinta del Sordo, and covered its walls with fourteen dark, visionary works, the Black Paintings: Saturn Devouring His Son, The Dog, Fight with Cudgels, The Witches' Sabbath. Removed from the walls in the nineteenth century, they are now in the Prado. Disillusioned with Ferdinand VII's absolutism, in 1824 he moved to Bordeaux, where he died on 16 April 1828. Since 1919 he has rested in the hermitage of San Antonio de la Florida in Madrid, beneath the dome he frescoed in 1798.
Where to see Goya
The Prado Museum in Madrid has the richest collection, with the cartoons, portraits, the Majas, the Second and Third of May and the Black Paintings. Madrid also has the Royal Academy of San Fernando and San Antonio de la Florida; Zaragoza the Goya Museum and El Pilar; Fuendetodos his birthplace and a printmaking museum. See also eighteenth-century art and modern art.