Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was born on 30 March 1746 in Fuendetodos, a small village in the province of Aragon, the son of a master gilder. He trained in Zaragoza, then spent time in Italy in 1771, and by 1775 was in Madrid, working on cartoons for the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Barbara under the direction of the German painter Anton Raphael Mengs. Those tapestry cartoons — The Parasol, The Swing, hunting scenes — are bright, rococo, decorative; they belong to a different universe from the work he would make twenty years later. His ascent through court patronage was steady: he was appointed court painter to Charles III in 1786, court painter to Charles IV in 1789, and in 1799 First Court Painter. The Family of Charles IV (1800–01), his group portrait of the royal family, was commissioned as a dynastic statement; what Goya delivered was a dysfunctional assembly of unprepossessing faces, Charles IV looking bovine and his wife María Luisa looking formidable — the portrait so frank that Théophile Gautier later wrote that it looked like the corner baker and his family after winning the lottery. The crisis that divided Goya's life in two came in the winter of 1792–93, when a severe illness — its exact nature debated, possibly autoimmune, possibly syphilitic — left him permanently and totally deaf at the age of 46. Cut off from conversation, he became increasingly interior. Los Caprichos, published in 1799 as a set of 80 aquatint etchings, announced the shift: plate 43, titled El sueño de la razón produce monstruos — The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters — showed a figure slumped at a desk while owls and bats swarmed out of the darkness behind him. The print was a declaration of artistic intent and a diagnosis of his era. On 2 May 1808, French troops of Napoleon's occupying army fired on a crowd in the Puerta del Sol in Madrid; the following night, mass executions of suspected insurgents took place on the hill of Príncipe Pío. Goya was in Madrid. He painted both events — The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808 — in 1814, at the request of the restored Bourbon government, working from memory and whatever visual intelligence he had gathered. The Third of May 1808, with its white-shirted man with arms flung open before a French firing squad, its lantern throwing a cold cone of light onto the scene while the gunmen stand with their backs to us, created the template for every subsequent image of political execution — including Manet's Execution of Maximilian and Picasso's Massacre in Korea. Goya continued working through the Peninsular War's savage years (1808–14), documenting atrocities in the Disasters of War etchings, 82 plates not published in his lifetime. Between roughly 1820 and 1823 he covered the walls of his country house, the Quinta del Sordo (House of the Deaf Man) outside Madrid, with fourteen large murals painted directly onto plaster — the Black Paintings, including Saturn Devouring His Son, a colossus in darkness consuming a human body in blind animal terror. Saturn is now generally read as a self-portrait of sorts, the artist consuming his own world. When the liberal constitutional order collapsed in 1823 under Ferdinand VII, Goya sought permission to travel to France for his health. He settled in Bordeaux, a Spanish exile community forming there, and continued to work in miniature, in chalk, and in the new medium of lithography until his death on 16 April 1828, aged 82. The Black Paintings, transferred to canvas from the Quinta del Sordo in 1874, are now in the Prado.
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Spanish painter and printmaker · Court painter turned unflinching witness of war
Francisco de Goya
1,746 CE – 1,828 CE
The Aragonese who began as a court decorator and ended as the painter of war's true face — his Saturn devouring a son and his firing-squad scene from 3 May are the two images 19th-century Spain could not erase from the world's memory.
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