Plate |
I. | Ferdinand Guillemardet | Frontispiece |
| Museum of the Louvre |
II. | La Maja Clothed | 14 |
| Museum of the Prado, Madrid |
III. | The Woman with the Fan | 24 |
| Museum of the Louvre |
IV. | Portrait of Goya | 34 |
| Museum of the Prado, Madrid |
V. | The Duchess of Alba | 40 |
| Collection of the Duke of Alba, Madrid |
VI. | King Charles IV and his Family | 50 |
| Museum of the Prado, Madrid |
VII. | La Tirana | 60 |
| Museum of the Prado, Madrid |
VIII. | Josefa Bayeu | 70 |
| Museum of the Prado, Madrid |
On a certain clear morning in the year 1760, a monk from the convent of Santa FÉ, near Saragossa, was proceeding leisurely along the road which leads to that city, and reciting his breviary as he went. Raising his eyes from between two psalms, he perceived a young lad of some fifteen years of age deeply absorbed in drawing pictures with a bit of charcoal on one of the walls which bounded the way. The monk was a lover of the arts and had himself some little skill in drawing. Becoming interested, he drew nearer, and was amazed at the aptitude shown by the boy. Upon questioning him, he was much pleased with his replies and was completely won by his engaging manners. Without further reflection, he inquired the way to the home of the lad’s parents, poor peasants of the immediate neighbourhood, and had no difficulty in persuading them to entrust their son to him, promising to make him a painter of whom they would some day be proud.
History has not preserved the name of the worthy monk so kindly disposed to art, but the boy was destined to make his own name illustrious: Francisco JosÉ Goya y Lucientes, the poor son of farming folk of Saragossa, fulfilled the promises of his patron. He had talent; better yet, he had genius; he fraternized with princes and with kings, and the renown of his glory restored its lost dignity to the art of Spain and did honour to painting throughout the world.
PLATE II.—LA MAJA (CLOTHED)
(Museum of the Prado, Madrid)
This reclining woman represents a very characteristic type of Spanish beauty. Goya has painted this picture under two different aspects, although in an absolutely identical pose. In one, the woman is represented completely nude, while here the artist has clothed her in corselet and trousers. It is asserted that the Duchess of Alba served him as model for both of these pictures.
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. One only in all their number, a certain Claudio Coello, mustered sufficient energy to attempt to carry on the broken tradition. With praiseworthy insistence and undoubted talent he endeavoured to restore its bygone dignity to the painting of his time. Among many other noteworthy works, a magnificent canvas from his hand may still be seen in the sacristy of the Escurial. But this unlucky artist, like all the others, had[Pg 15]
[Pg 16] come too late into a world which had grown too old. He could no longer be understood. The same decadence had overspread the whole of Europe, but to a greater degree in Spain than elsewhere. Politics, customs, traditions, popular taste, all bore the imprint of that degeneracy which heralds the end of a race. What could a Claudio Coello do in a society that had disintegrated to such a degree? His strength seemed too brutal, his realism was accused of barbarity, and the conscientiousness of his line-work caused him to be considered as a painter who had become old-fashioned and had fallen behind his times. All the favour of that period was bestowed upon the fa presto school of painting. Luca Giordano, who usurped Coello’s place in the regard of Philip II., had begun to inundate Spain with his facile and spiritless productions. He covered the walls of the Escurial with frescoes brushed in with a turn of the wrist, the dexterity of which ill concealed their absolute lack of inspiration. In his wake a swarm of Neapolitan painters, equally dexterous, but of even less worth, swooped down upon the peninsula, and day by day still further perverted the standard of popular taste. With the dawn of the seventeenth century the decadence, instead of diminishing, became more accentuated. The Neapolitans had been succeeded by Frenchmen—but what Frenchmen! Their art had neither the nobility of Poussin, nor the greatness of Le Brun, nor the suavity of Le Sueur; they bore such names as Ranc, Hovasse, Louis and Michel Vanloo, and their manner drew its inspiration from the worst type of composition brought into fashion by Mignard. Their whole effort was confined to producing the merely pretty, and their tastelessness was absolutely, yet regrettably, adapted to the growing affectation of the century. After them came the turn of the Tiepolos: these latter were not merely remarkable virtuosos of the palette; their prodigious facility was frequently ennobled by genuine talent; their line-work, though too often slighted, still showed a certain degree of conscientiousness, and some of their works are really worthy of admiration. But they too were infected with the malady of the century; they sacrificed themselves to the taste of their day, which was definitely degraded to the extravagances of fashion and the frivolities of gallantry. They were wholly lacking in the ability to impart to this type of painting the vivacious charm which the graceful and smiling ease of Watteau, Fragonard, and Boucher bestowed upon it in France. There was no ground for hoping that they would ever effect a renaissance of the Spanish school.
Finally Charles III. summoned to Madrid a painter of German origin, Mengs by name, who at that time was regarded as the Messiah of an art which was destined to unite “the grace of Apelles, the expression of Raphael, the chiaroscuro of Correggio, and the colouring of Titian!” Unusually gifted though he was, Mengs did not possess the necessary calibre to fulfil such brilliant promises. Haunted by the great compositions of Le Brun, he confined himself to the mythological order of painting and drew his inspiration from his illustrious model, without ever achieving an equal eminence or duplicating the latter’s admirable skill in composition. Upon his appointment as Superintendent of Fine-Arts in Spain, he established a sort of artistic dictatorship, which forced Spanish painting as a whole to adopt his own special aesthetic creed. The influence of Mengs would have been even more disastrous than that of his predecessors, if Providence had not placed Goya in the path of the artist monk of Saragossa.
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 Zurbaran. He has their ardour, their vehemence, their passionate love for nature; like them, he finds the source of his strength in direct observation; as with them, the secret of his genius resides in that inner flame which bursts out of bounds in blazing flashes, with no clever trickery, no premeditation, but with that spontaneity which is born only of a clear vision, aided by a vigorous brush.
Nevertheless, this descendant of bygone masters is the most modern of all Spanish painters. He is never imitative, he always creates. From the living springs of great art he draws only what he needs to sustain his strength: a pious reverence for form, conscientiousness in line-work, sobriety of colour, and harmony of the component parts. For the rest, he is wholly of his own time, and of none other than his own time. He is truly the painter of national Spanish life. What he paints most willingly, most gladly, are the dances, the games, the joyous gatherings, the corridas, full of ardour and of movement, the majas, the manolas, the toreros, all the popular types; and one and all, as he pictures them, are spirited, life-like, entertaining, and well grouped, standing out boldly against their background of spreading fields, or bathing gaily in the violent clarity of the sunshine of Castile.
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.