Goy

“ Could an artist who was indifferent have expressed himself in such pathetic accents? Could a renegade have been stirred to such a point by all these horrors? Furthermore, Goya made no overtures to the invaders. ”

“ The advent of Goya in the middle of the eighteenth century marks a sort of providential date in the art of the peninsula. The Spanish school had fallen into profound decadence. Of the great traditions of Velazquez, Ribera, Zurbaran, and El Greco, nothing survived save the regret of knowing that they were forever lost. All the prodigious strength and powerful realism of that glorious period had become degenerate, enfeebled, anaemic to the point of utter decrepitude. In the horde of artists of that time, not a single hand was capable of taking up the brush let fall by the great predecessors. ”

“ Goya "had lived." His life was that of the nobleman-artist—a stormy novel, full of mysterious amours. His pupils, on parting the curtains of his studio, saw the silk of royal skirts on their master's knees. The dainty duchesses of the period resorted to that robust Aragonese of rough, manly gallantry to have him paint their cheeks, laughing like mad at these intimate touches. ”

“ A spirited small creature bears the little Don Carlos; a showy, powerful brute the swaggering Olivares; a beast, trained in stately menage, the proud and reserved king. With Goya, however, there is little apparent study of the structure or character of the animal; it is felt for its value as a handsome mass. And the rider’s figure seems to have been felt in the same way; as if by emphasising its mass the artist could evade the inevitable commonplace of the face. ”

“ When considered under this double aspect, surrounded by the twin aureole of classicism and realism, Goya is seen to be an exceptional nature. He builds his fantasies upon a solid foundation of technique, and it is precisely because he founds his work upon this impregnable basis that he is able without apprehension to challenge the judgment of future centuries, and that his name will descend through the ages crowned with an unfading glory. ”

“ PLATE FROM THE CAPRICHOS
Francisco Goya
Before proceeding to English prints, let us glance at the one prominent figure in Spanish etching: Francisco Goya. A painter-etcher of intense feeling, fiery, impulsive, he feels acutely the evils under which his country is groaning. In an art largely allusive and bitterly satirical, he conjures before us an abyss of human wretchedness, greed, and misrule in those strange “Caprichos” from which an illustration has been selected. ”

“ This immense work required no less than three years of the artist’s time, and he expended upon it all his science and all his exceptional qualities as a colourist. It is an attractive work, cleverly composed, possessing a fine decorative effect, brilliant and warm, and in no way inferior to the most resplendent frescoes of Tiepolo. Only one thing was lacking, the religious spirit, of which Goya was wholly destitute. In works of this order, dexterity is not sufficient; the breath of the inner zeal is necessary; cleverness, dexterity, the gift of colour, cannot make up for the absence of faith. ”

“ This singular method of abstract study, which may be called the method of intuition, explains perhaps how so frank an individuality as that of Goya, far from being enfeebled by contact with the past, became on the contrary stronger and more genuinely alive. ”

“ The old Goya remained, strong in the creation of a lofty art. The last twenty years of his life were full indeed, and represented its most vigorous phase, the most energetic in the whole course of his achievement. Scenes of war and disaster occupied almost the whole of this important period, full of a profound pessimism, which still does not lack a certain graceful style, and displays unceasingly some of the saddest thoughts which man has ever known. These works of Goya are not of any party, are not political nor sectarian. They are simply human. ”

“ By the time that Goya reached his maturity the range of his palette was reduced to very restricted limits: blue, white, black, vermilion, some of the ochres and burnt sienna. And his tools were correspondingly meagre. Brushes of the rudest make served his purpose; or he would use a sponge or stick, securing some of his subtlest effects with the ball of his thumb. From several unfinished bust-portraits in the Prado it appears that he worked over an under-surface of orange-red; which no doubt accounts for the warmth and fulness of his greys. ”

“ PLATE VI.—KING CHARLES IV AND HIS FAMILY
(Museum of the Prado, Madrid)
Goya was the favourite painter of the king Charles IV, who conferred upon him the title of First Painter. In this fine painting, which raised the reputation of the artist to its zenith, the members of the royal family are admirably and sincerely rendered, without a trace of flattery. All the degeneracy of the dynasty is to be read in these countenances, in terms of convincing eloquence. ”

“ It is, I am now certain, from these designs that Vierge obtained many of his ideas—although they are worked out in an entirely different fashion. The drawings for the "Caprices" are in pen and wash, and are as much finer than the aquatints made from them, as the aquatints are superior to the caricatures of any of his contemporaries. As Goya passed, an exile, the latter part of his life in France, his work must have been known to the men of 1830. ”

“ For sensitiveness to the beauty of the human body, for curious research in the esthetic inversion, the beauty of the hideous, Goya stands alone. No one, not even Leonardo, has plumbed so deep in the hidden shadowy parts. ”

“ Such are Goya's works as far as the actual world is concerned, but it is when he abandons himself to his demonographic inspirations that he is especially admirable: no one can represent as he can, floating in the warm atmosphere of a stormy night, dark masses of clouds loaded with vampires, goblins and demons, or make a cavalcade of witches stand out with such startling effect from the sinister background of the horizon. ”

“ It is worth remembering that Delacroix was one of the first artists in Paris who secured a set of these rare plates. The witch's sabbaths and the modern version of them, prostitution and its symbolism, filled the brain of Goya. He always shocks any but robust nerves with his hybrid creatures red in claw and foaming at mouth as they fight in midair, hideous and unnamable phantoms of the dark. His owls are theologians. The females he often shows make us turn aside our head and shudder. ”

“ Goya went first of all to Paris, but he made a stay there of short duration. Almost all his friends from Madrid, whom Ferdinand VII. had driven from Spain, had taken refuge in Bordeaux, where they formed a veritable colony. He proceeded to join it and decided to settle down among them.
He did not, however, remain inactive. This prodigious worker, who was now nearly eighty years old, could not resign himself to rest; he once again took up his brush with a hand which his great age could not yet cause to tremble. ”

“ The type of the "Complaisant Mother" is marvellously rendered by Goya, who, like all the Spanish painters, possesses a ready and profound sense of the ignoble. It is impossible to fancy anything more grotesquely horrible, more viciously deformed. Each of these frightful old shrews unites in her own person the ugliness of the seven capital sins; compared to them, the Prince of Darkness himself is pretty. Just fancy whole ditches and counterscarps of wrinkles; eyes like live coals that have been extinguished in blood; noses like the neck of an alembic, covered with warts and other excrescences ”

“ Such men seem to leave an unhappy impress upon the trees and mountains, and their point of view vulgarizes the blue sky. They may be very brilliant handlers of the brush—indeed they are often excellent craftsmen—but their vision is sadly warped and their minds are tainted. There are, for instance, few workmen more fascinating in craftsmanship than Goya. He could paint beautifully and convincingly, but when you go to Spain and see the mass of his painting you will be surprised at the blood and flame and brutality of it. ”

“ A single stroke expresses a whole physiognomy, and a trail of shade serves as a background, or allows the spectator to catch a glimpse of some landscape only half-sketched in, or some pass of a sierra, fit scenes for a murder, a witches' sabbath, or a tertulia of gipsies; but this is rare, for the background cannot be said to exist in Goya's works. Like Michael Angelo, he completely despises external nature, and only takes just sufficient to enable him to group his figures, and very often he composes his background of clouds alone. ”

“ Atmospheric effect in landscapes of cool tints varying from grey green to pearl or brown and yellow dun is the principal object which van Goyen holds in view, and he succeeds admirably in light skies with drifting misty cloud, and downs with cottages and scanty shrubbery or stunted trees. ”

“ The genius of Goya was a robust, imperious, and fulminating genius; his iron temperament was passionate, dramatic, and revolutionary; he painted a picture as he would have fought a battle. He was an athletic, warlike, and indefatigable painter; a naturalist like Velazquez; fantastic like Hogarth; eccentric like Rembrandt; the last flame-coloured flash of Spanish genius.
It is impossible to reproduce his colouring ”

“ A wonderful chance ordained that, in the province of art, the most powerful figure of that storm and tumult, the one artist of the age of the race of Prometheus, to which belonged the young Goethe and the young Schiller, should be born in the most mediæval country in Europe, on Spanish soil. Against an art that was more catholic than catholicism, courtly and mystical, there came by far the greatest reaction in Goya. From Roelas, Collantes, and Murillo to him there is hardly any transition. ”

“ As to the execution, it is remarkable: the lines are clear-cut and vigorous, the [Pg 67] design is solid, almost schematic in places for the purpose of enhancing the energy; with incomparable art, Goya makes use of contrasts for the purpose of obtaining astonishing relief, perfect modelling, and effects of light that produce the illusion of painting. In these compositions he shows the variety and flexibility of his talent, which undertook with equal felicity the most widely diverse branches of his art. ”

“ Goya made his appearance, and with him Spanish art underwent a renewal and an aggrandizement. With one formidable backward leap, he attained the point of the broken tradition, in order to reweld the glorious chain. No intermediary connects him with the splendid lineage of Spanish painters. He proceeds directly from them. He is the natural heir of Velazquez and [Pg 20] Zurbaran. He has their ardour, their vehemence, their passionate love for nature; like them, he finds the source of his strength in direct observation ”

“ The etched collections by which Goya is best known include “Los Caprichos,” which have a satirical meaning known only to the few; they are bold, weird and full of force. “Los Proverbios” are also supposed to have some hidden intention. “Los Desastres de la Guerra” may fairly claim to depict Spain during the French invasion. In the bull-fight series Goya is evidently at home; he was a skilled master of the barbarous art, and no doubt every sketch is true to nature, and from life.
Goya retired from Madrid, desiring probably during his latter years to escape the trying climate of that capital. ”

“ On to the stage of this shabby comedy of court life, set with the scenery of a nation’s humiliation, Goya entered and made an immediate hit. A man of violent passions, without conscience or scruples, he played his part as if all the characteristics of his contemporaries were represented in himself. He has left a self-portrait, painted some seven years after his appearance on{173} the scene. It now hangs in the Prado and might be mistaken for the portrait of a bull-fighter. Indeed, it reminds us that at one period of his young days Goya became efficient in the bull-ring. ”

“ In fact, there is revealed here a colorist of extraordinary refinement and subtlety; and of an imagination that is rare among painters. Goya’s original fondness for varied and positive colors has matured into a mastery over a few hues, treated with exquisite nuances. And the secret of this marvelous color-expression is the artis{178}t’s new way of looking at his subject. He has become an impressionist in the modern sense. He stands forth, indeed, as the first of modern impressionists, the forerunner by nearly a hundred years of the principal art-motive of the nineteenth century. ”

“ In this class belong the admirable Young Man in Gray, the painter’s grandson—this portrait is certainly one of the most beautiful of all Goya’s works—and the famous portraits of Moratin, Boyeu, Josefa Bayeu, the architect Villanueva, and the two Majas, both the nude and the clothed, which are said to be portraits of the Duchess of Alba, taken in the same pose but under two different aspects. ”

“ Highly as the chap ranked, he would rank even higher before they had finished with him. The second Goya craze would be greater even than the first; oh, yes! And he had bought. On that visit he had—as never before—commissioned a copy of a fresco painting called "La Vendimia," wherein was the figure of a girl with an arm akimbo, who had reminded him of his daughter. He had it now in the Gallery at Mapledurham, and rather poor it was—you couldn't copy Goya. ”