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. Besides, he was not well off, possessing scarcely anything besides his house in Spain and his pension as First Painter.

Accordingly, he continued to paint genre pictures and numerous portraits. Those of Don Juan Maguire, M. Pio de Molina, and M. J. Galos date from this epoch. He also painted another of his friends, also exiled, whom he met again at Bordeaux—Moratin, the celebrated Spanish poet, who, carried away by his passion for democracy, had sung the French invasion in eloquent stanzas and now expiated his error in exile.

Besides the portraits, Goya painted some very beautiful miniatures on ivory, and he renewed his experiments in lithography, which he had already undertaken in Madrid some years previous. His four large examples representing Bull Fights are masterpieces of colour and of movement.

In 1827 Goya had to journey back to Madrid, in order to make a personal appeal to the king for an extension of his leave of absence. Since he could not persuade Goya to remain, the king freely granted the favour requested; but he imposed one condition, and a very flattering one to the artist: namely, that he would first allow his portrait to be painted by Don Vicente Lopez, at that time Pintor da Camara. This portrait is now to be seen at the museum in Madrid.

That same year he returned to Bordeaux and once more resumed his cherished habits and his brush and palette. Many of the works of this later period remained in France, and the museum at Bordeaux possesses a considerable number of them.

Goya still continued to work, but his hands had begun to tremble and he could no longer see without the aid of a lens. His strength was failing and he felt that the end was drawing near. He sent for his son, Xavier, who had continued to reside at Madrid; and a few days later, on the 15th of April, 1828, he passed away in the arms of his friends, at the age of eighty-two years and fifteen days.

Goya was truly a great artist in the noblest sense of the term. He possessed qualities which were at one and the same time substantial and brilliant; he was versatile and original, a spirited genre painter and a remarkable portraitist. “In the tomb of Goya,” writes ThÉophile Gautier, “the ancient art of Spain lies buried; gone forever is the world of the toreros, the majos, the manolas, the contrabandists, the alguazils, and the sorceresses, the entire local colour of the Peninsula. He arrived in time to gather all this together and to preserve it on his canvas. He fancied that he painted only ‘caprices;’ yet what he really did was to paint the portrait of bygone Spain, all the time convinced that he was giving his service to the new ideas and new beliefs.”