Van Gogh •
Artist Biographies
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Francisco Jose de Goya
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Francisco Jose de Goya |
| Birth Year : |
1746 |
| Death Year : |
1828 |
| Country : |
Spain |
Francisco José Goya y Lucientes, one of the greatest and most original of Spanish
painters, was born in Fuendetodos, and took his first art lessons from his father, a master gilder. Goya learned the art of etching from the monks in Saragossa before going in 1776 to Madrid where
Tiepolo and Mengs were working. Goya found the work of
Tiepolo to his liking and his earliest works show the influence of that master and of the French Rococo painters. In 1786 he became court painter and accomplished a brilliant series of royal portraits in the styles of
Velázquez and
Rembrandt, the two artists whom he then most admired. These royal portraits were subtle in gradations of tone, with light pouring in from the side, and are executed in a sparkling manner.
Goya fell ill in 1792 and lost his hearing, but during his convalescence the powerful style for which he is now remembered emerged: introverted, sarcastic,
and humanistic-biting satire on social mores with more than a hint of double meaning. The Napoleonic Invasion in 1808, the cruel and merciless killings of the invading armies caused a transformation of Goya's art. His paintings reflect his own bitter experience during this time: the broad brushstrokes blazing with light and color set against dark backgrounds create a vivid image of the horrors of war. In 1814 with the restoration of the Spanish monarchy under Ferdinand VII, Goya, a Republican, retired to a house in the country and abandoned his bright palette for a dark and somber one. He adorned his walls with the so-called "Black" frescoes-pessimistic yet imaginative images of degraded and bestial humanity. They are terrible but fascinating-hallucinatory nightmares that foretell of death and destruction. At the fall of the Cortes in 1824, Goya retreated into voluntary exile, in Bordeaux, where he died in 1828. His greatest influence was upon the nineteenth-century French Romantic painters, particularly
Delacroix and
Gericault.
US
"I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true."
