West European Studies

Francisco de Goya was born in Fuendetodos, a village in Aragon, Spain, on March 30, 1746. Goya became studying art as an apprentice to Jose Luzan at the age of fourteen and continued his art education in Italy (Franciscodegoya.net). He returned to Spain in 1771 and painted frescoes in local cathedrals which helped establish his artistic reputation. In Madrid, he joined painter brothers Francisco and Ramon Bayeu y Subias and later married their sister (metmuseum.org).
In 1774, he was introduced to the royal workshop, resulting in a lifelong relationship with the Spanish monarchy. Between 1775 and 1792, he painted cartoons or designs for the royal tapestry factory. The period marked an important period of his artistic development as he became a keen observer of human behavior. These tapestry paintings depict human behavior of rich and poor and young and old during their daily activities. Blind Man Playing the Guitar belongs to this period. During this time he was also influenced by neoclassicism, a style which was increasingly gaining favor over the established rococo style.

As he became better known among the Spanish aristocracy, he began receiving more and more commissions to paint the executives and their families. One of these was Count Altamira for whose family Goya painted four portraits. His associations with this powerful family greatly advanced his career. In 1788, Goya painted a portrait of Condesa de Altamira and Her Daughter, a painting which accurately captures the sensitivity of the sitters and the wealth of his patrons. This and several other paintings helped establish him as a portrait painter and in 1786, he became the painter to King Charles III. In 1789, soon after he finished painting the portrait of Condesa de Altamira, he was appointed the court painter under King Charles IV. The hallmark of his paintings was his disinclination to flatter. This is especially apparent in the case of Charles IV of Spain and His Family which is remarkable for its lack of visual discretion. According to Schwartz (2005), Goya disliked working on commission and so while working for his patrons, he would paint in subtle references to human ambiguities.

In 1792, Goya suffered from a serious illness which left him permanently blind. He returned to Madrid in 1793 and 1793, completed and published a collection of eighty aquatinted etchings titled Caprichos. The Caprichos are considered an enlightened critique of 18th century Spain and humanity in general (Wikipedia). The most important work from this collection is titled El sueno de la razon produce monstrous (The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters). The Sleep of Reason Produces Monster is the 43rd plate in the collection which depicts a sleeping portrait of the artists surrounded by owls and bats symbolizing folly and ignorance.

Between 1808 and 1814, during the Spanish invasion of the Napoleonic war, Goya served as the court painter to the French. During this time, he was extremely disturbed by the aristocracies of war and expressed them in a series of etchings titled The Disasters of War, which was not published until 1863.
Sometime around 1800, Goya painted one of his most famous work, The Naked Maja. At the end of the Napoleonic war, while he was pardoned for serving the French, the new king did not like his work and he was summoned by the Inquisition to explain the Naked Maja, which was considered obscene at the time. Goya refused to paint clothes on to the painting and instead painted a new painting of the same woman in the same pose but fully clothed.

From 1819 to 1924, Goya lived in seclusion in a two-storey house outside Madrid named Quinta del Sordo or The Deaf Mans House. During his time there, he painted fourteen paintings, directly in to the wall of the house. These paintings are known as the Black Paintings because of their dark themes. These paintings were not meant for public display and hence were never titled. They were titled by art experts after his death. The most famous of the Black Paintings is called Saturn Devouring His Son. The painting is an extremely dark depiction of the myth wherein the Greek God Saturn eats his son in the fear that the son will overthrow him.

In 1824, Goya went into exile to Bordeaux, France and continued to live there until his death on April 16, 1828.