Chapter III: Part 3

It would have been strange indeed if Goya had resisted the temptations by which he was surrounded; it is remarkable under the circumstances that he remained unspoiled. The King, as we have seen, was his friend, the Queen confided to him her most delicate secrets, the all-powerful Prince de la Pax made him welcome at Aranjuez, and the most distinguished women of the day delighted in entertaining him. Writing to his friend Zapater about his success at this period, he said: ‘I had established for myself an enviable mode of life; I no longer danced attendance in an ante-chamber; if anybody wanted anything of mine he had to come to me. I was much sought after, but if it was not anybody in a high position, or to oblige a friend, I worked for none.’ He was a privileged guest at the palaces of the Marchioness of Santa Cruz and of San Carlos; Brunetti and the Countess of Benavente fêted him. His relations with the beautiful and vivacious Duchess of Alba are too well known to call for more than a passing mention. The artist painted at least a dozen portraits of the Duchess, in one of which he presents himself in company with his inamorata. He introduced her piquant features into the frescoes of San Antonio de la Florida. She is the model for the nude and clothed Maja which hang in the Prado Museum. Tradition has it that the clothed Maja was painted to meet the wishes of the Duke, who expressed a desire to inspect the master’s work. The story is almost comical to any one who has stood in front of the two pictures. Nothing but the most conventional views upon the subject of the nude could make the naked study more offensive in the eyes of a husband than the one in which the young woman, ‘naked in spite of her dress,’ appears to challenge the continence of all the St. Anthonys of Christendom.

Of these pictures Mr. Charles Ricketts writes in an illuminating chapter on _The Masterpieces of the Prado_: ‘Goya’s two pictures are still vivacious and fresh. In “La Maja,” a nude, he has painted the sensuous waist, the frail arms, the dainty head of the Duchess thrown upon pillows, contrasting in their gray whiteness with the gleam upon her flesh. In the other we note the same grace of pose, a more summary workmanship, touches of colour--too many perhaps. The Duchess of Alba (La Maja) reclines on her divan in her rich bolero and white duck trousers of a toreador or Spanish dandy. We pause, we are astonished and charmed; we wonder how such a thing was possible. Her beauty and daring live on the two canvases; this one scandal in the nineteenth century has endowed the world with those pictures, and they are now in the Prado. So ends the adventure.’

The scandal which associated Goya’s name with that of the Duchess of Alba, fanned, it may be suspected, by the jealousy of the Countess of Benavente, could not be concealed, and by the order of Maria Luisa, the Duchess was banished in 1795 to the seclusion of her estate at San Lucar. The painter immediately obtained from the King a prolonged leave of absence and accompanied her into exile. On the journey to San Lucar an accident happened to their carriage, and Goya with his characteristic energy set to work to repair the defect. An iron bar belonging to the coach was buckled; a fire had to be lighted and the iron made straight. The heat and the unwonted exertion which the operation entailed was followed by a chill, and from this chill resulted the deafness which, in later years, became complete. The Duchess was recalled in the following year--this exercise of royal clemency being apparently the only means of securing the return of the painter to Madrid--and died in the same year in the fullness of her exquisite and inspiring beauty.

The period of Goya’s greatest popularity (1780-1800) was the period of his greatest activity. He was high in the favour of the Court. Much of his time was absorbed in painting portraits of his royal and aristocratic patrons. At the same time he never lost touch with the commonalty, nor his powers to depict, with sympathy and understanding, the life of the country--the bustling, laughing, loving, wrangling, vibrating life he loved and to which, by birth and temperament, he belonged. It is probable that he was never a courtier at heart. His effrontery and uncompromising independence, combined with incisive wit and physical strength, made him at once a singular and incongruous but popular figure in the Court circles, while his frank _camaraderie_ and his amazing prowess in the national games and feats of strength, and above all, the boldness and skill of his demeanour in the bull-ring--in which he is said to have been the equal of the professional espada--won for him the enthusiastic admiration of the hero-worshipping people of Madrid. He seems to have been at no pains to disguise the real bent of his nature. The story runs that he would frequently leave the royal palace to pass the night in the most disreputable taverns and bodegas in the suburbs of Madrid, drinking, dicing, and merrymaking with the night-birds of the capital.

But Goya’s artistic output showed no signs of falling off either in quality or amount, and his marvellous rapidity of workmanship enabled him to produce an almost incredible number of canvases. In a biography and review of this size and scope it is not possible to present a leisured review of his pictures. We must be content with a brief notice of the more important among them, but the illustrations at the end of the volume which are produced in such wealth, and which constitute the chief interest of this book, will speak more eloquently than words. Of Goya’s methods of painting many stories are told, from which it might be concluded that he employed for the purpose every instrument known to art with the solitary exception of a brush. Gautier, who declared his mode to be as eccentric as his talent, has exhausted all the facts and legends relating to his brush-work (if so it can be called) in the following vivacious descriptive passage: ‘He kept his colours in tubs, and applied them to the canvas by means of sponges, brooms, rags, and everything that happened to be within his reach. He put on his tones with a trowel, as it were, exactly like so much mortar, and painted touches of sentiment with large daubs of his thumb. From the fact of his working in this offhand and expeditious manner, he would cover some thirty feet of wall in a couple of days. This method certainly appears somewhat to exceed even the licence accorded to the most impetuous and fiery genius; the most dashing painters are but children compared to him. He executed, with a spoon for a brush, a painting of the “Dos de Mayo,” where some French troops are shooting a number of Spaniards. It is a work of incredible vigour and fire.’

The vigour and fire which Gautier finds in this picture is to be observed in varying degree in all Goya’s works. These qualities were the results of his temperament, which moved him to fling his ideas upon the canvas before they could escape him, and imbued him with a constant desire to be rid of them and at work on something else. ‘His whole art,’ says Muther, ‘seems like a bull-fight; for everywhere he sees before him some red rag, and hurls himself upon it with the fury of the toro.’ Nor did his sitters escape the consequences of his impetuosity. Many of his portraits were painted in a day, but the sitting lasted not a few hours merely but the whole of the day, during which time, Mr. Rothenstein tells us, ‘Goya, inexorable towards his model, worked in absolute silence with extraordinary concentration and vigour.’ The same writer relates, as an example of his nervousness and irritability in his studio, the story that the Duke of Wellington so exasperated Goya while he was painting his portrait by passing comments upon his work while the picture was in progress, that he took a sword from the wall and forced his noble sitter to beat a retreat from his studio. Other authorities state that it was with a pair of pistols that he put the English Duke to flight. After all, the weapon is not a material point in the story.

A man who worked at this pressure might be expected to develop a tendency to scamp his work, but while many of Goya’s compositions are mere sketches, they are all finished according to his theory that ‘a picture is finished when its effect is true.’ The many compositions Goya executed for the Countess of Benavente, until recently at the Alameda Palace, comprised the most representative exhibition of Goya’s genius. The collection included many pictures painted with exceptional delicacy. The most important of these pictures, the Romeria de San Isidro, is a wonderful canvas containing a mass of details which astonish by their clearness and finish. The ‘Coach attacked by Brigands’ is one example among many of his skill in catching an instantaneous motion and transfixing it upon the canvas. Among the Alameda paintings are some repetitions of the designs for the tapestry factory. The exuberant gaiety in these pictures is in amazing contrast with the ‘San Bernard’ or the terrifying cartoon of ‘Saturn devouring his Children.’ Goya can be simple and bizarre, idyllic and grotesque, fascinating and appalling--his vitality emphasises every facet of his imagination. The examples of phases of his many-sided vision are inexhaustible. He makes demons terrible by their humanity, and men and women horrible by their diabolical sinisterism. He paints you a fête or a funeral, a picnic or a hanging, with the same facility and artistic assurance; be the mood he would portray gay or gloomy, the scene brilliant or shuddersome, the beauty that of a child, a blushing maiden or a dazzling Maja, he never hesitates, nor does he often come short of success.

In his portraits he is a realist--versatile, vivid, often unflinching in his brutality, unsurpassed, when he wills it, in perfection of treatment and intention. His finish is the fulfilment of his purpose, which has nothing in common with finish in the sense of elaboration. True, many of his likenesses are ‘washed in with a certain impatience, almost as if the painter had tired of his subject’ (C. Gasquoine Hartley, in _A Record of Spanish Painting_); true again, the restlessness of his temperament made him inclined to seize on a characteristic rendering of pose and feature: but his portraits reflect the idea in his mind; they express the always very definite something he has to say; the effect is true and the picture is finished. It was his method to arrange his canvas, his model and all his accessories, and then remain wrapped in profound reflection. When his study of his model was ended he set to work, either to materialise his inspiration in a swift realisation of a personality, or to produce a suave, lingering piece of workmanship which recalls the refinement of Gainsborough in its elaborate, exquisite detail.

Goya, by virtue of his portraits, has been rightly acclaimed the legitimate descendant of Velazquez, and, like the great Court painter of a previous century, he is a magnificent exception. But the comparison between the two masters cannot be pushed too far. Velazquez was a realist to whom the world appeared as a beautiful vision; Goya was a realist to whom life was always a drama and not infrequently a satiric melodrama played in the tempo of a farce. Velazquez depicted men and women at their noblest; Goya, when he was in the mood, detected the worst that was in them and he exposed it with a flourish. The grandeur of the times which we discern in the portraits of Velazquez is the grandeur of the artist’s conception and treatment. The equestrian effigies of Philip III. and Philip IV. reveal the magnificence and nobility of conscious kingship which neither of the monarchs possessed; the royal likenesses convey to us a prosperity which impoverished Spain did not enjoy under the rule of his kingly sitters. Thus it is curious to find that some critics, but particularly the Conde de la Viñaza, should see in Goya’s work a similar determination to idealise and glorify the characters of his royal patrons. ‘The celebrated canvas of the family of Charles IV.,’ writes Goya’s latest Spanish biographer, ‘together with the equestrian portraits’--the composition of which, as Mr. Rothenstein reminds us, he may well have learned from Velazquez--‘of Maria Luisa and her husband, of Ferdinand VII. and Godoy, show forth a grandeur of mind and intellectual and moral qualities which these people did not possess. The Godoy represented by Goya as though he were a sort of Marquis de Pescara, although he never wore his uniform except at sham fights, recalls the fact that Velazquez also, flattering the ridiculous vanity of the Count-Duke of Olivarez, painted his portrait in a suit which was not his own.... Goya painted moral life hyperbolically idealised in his effigies of the kings, because he was painter to the Household and protected by the Crown and the Court, although he was rather the protector of his protectors. In all the other portraits of statesmen, politicians, literati, scientific men, actors, bull-fighters, priests and artists, Goya harmonised exactly the body and the mind. How marvellously he caught the faces of the men of great minds! How beautifully the moral and intellectual qualities of the person represented are shown!’

A second and more cautious reading of the foregoing passage was required to convince us that it was written without sarcasm, and was meant to express a sober estimate of the qualities which the writer discovered in the pictures referred to. Personal taste, as we have remarked elsewhere, counts for much in the whole field of art, and in the opinion which is quoted the Conde de la Viñaza has the field practically to himself. Nearly all Goya’s critics and admirers are united in their appreciation of the merciless and remorseless frankness, the pitiless satire, the mocking, saturnine faithfulness of the likenesses. Sir William Stirling-Maxwell misses the point of the equestrian portrait of Charles IV. when he remarks that ‘the poor imbecile king, in the blue uniform and cocked hat of a colonel of the guards, mounted on a sober brown charger,’ is ‘an example of the dignity which may be conferred, by a skilful hand, on the most ordinary features and expression, without sacrificing the resemblance.’ But who beside Viñaza and Stirling-Maxwell could detect anything but a burlesque of kingly dignity in this grandly-uniformed, coarsely-made and coarse-faced Bourbon who sits ‘asthmatic and fat, upon his fat asthmatic horse, with his fat asthmatic dog’--a study which moves a German critic to remark, ‘How like a Moloch he appears, an evil god who has battened upon the life-blood of his people.’

The portraits of his sensuous, passion-ridden queen are equally fearless, true even to brutality. Maria Luisa was a courtesan seated upon the throne of Spain. Velazquez, it has been wisely said, redeemed the face of Mariana of Austria in his portrait by making her unapproachable icy pride the keynote in his composition. Goya extenuates nothing. He shows the queen, _décolletée_ to vulgarity in her insolently vulgar gown, with gleaming arms and bosom exposed as a snare, which is watched over by the greedy, hawk-like eyes. It is the woman she was, the ‘woman who loved men better perhaps than she was loved by them,’ the courtesan that the artist knew and flattered and despised. Of the picture of the ‘Family of Charles IV.,’ with its fourteen life-size figures, it has been written that it ‘mirrors the hidden merriment with which Goya recorded the Court history.’ Here is a faithful exposition of Goya’s estimate of the Spanish royal family; an estimate which has never been so remorselessly expressed by any other delineator of royal groups. They are depicted in their resplendent uniforms and rich gowns, they have all the dignity that is derived from gorgeous trappings, but Goya has not spared them, or us, a tittle of their pitiful stupidity, their coarse insolence, their mental and moral degeneracy. ‘The heads are admirably painted, as Gautier admitted, ‘and are full of life, delicacy and intelligence’; but the French critic’s general verdict upon the group represented is his best tribute to the genius of the painter;--‘a grocer’s family who have won the big lottery prize.’

The more closely one studies these royal portraits the more one becomes convinced of their truth. To-day they remain as real to us as the sympathetic, Velazquezesque likenesses of the painter Bayeu in the Prado, or of Dr. Peral in the National Gallery. It is almost impossible for any one to be in a position to award the palm for supreme excellence among Goya’s portraits, for besides being so numerous, they are widely distributed among the aristocratic families of Spain, and many are practically inaccessible to the student. There are fewer than two dozen of his portraits in the Prado, only two in the National Gallery, and one in the Louvre. Few people are familiar with more than a certain number of his portraits. For this reason there are many different opinions as to the comparative merit of his pictures, but the individual opinions all constitute a remarkable tribute to the painter’s genius in catching the likeness and reflecting the character of his subjects.

Of the portrait of Villanueva, Señor Caveda writes that ‘it not only faithfully represents the features of the famous architect and the expression of him as a whole, but reveals in him the goodness of soul that animates him, and the noble simplicity of character which is so skilfully transmitted in all Goya’s impressions.’ Señor Mariano Nonqués, referring to the portrait of Moratin, now in the possession of Don F. Silvela, declares that ‘it may rightly be said without any appearance of exaggeration that this effigy is painted with the mind and with a spontaneity which is clearly seen, since there is nothing in it that reveals difficulty in the work, or any preconceived idea of imitating any other painter in its execution,’ and he adds that, by reason of the individuality it discloses, it should be considered one of the best likenesses painted by Goya. According to the painter Carlos Luis de Ribera, the genius of ‘La Tirana’ may be seen in the head of the portrait of the distinguished actress, Rosario Fernandez. ‘In it, as in all his (Goya’s) works,’ says this authority, ‘there is that air of truth which so few painters have attained; there is brilliancy and freshness without pretension or exaggeration, the model is simple and convenient, and while it makes no show of strength it is not weak. Its execution springs as much from sentiment as that of all his canvases, because it was never sought after by Goya, but was the consequence and result of his spontaneity and intuition.’ Again, of his portrait of José Luis Munarriz, the eminent critic, Don Francisco Maria Tubina, writes: ‘There is something on the canvas in addition to perfection in the technique, the beautiful development of the subject and the exact likeness; the immaterial part must be recognised and appreciated--the inner vigour Goya gives the character, which illumines the features with the glow of the soul. Munarriz is represented to us in the picture as the fancy imagines him, as we see him in his biography, ingenious and lively in thought, distinguished in form, kind and firm in temperament, prudent in judgment, and with a mind always directed upon things which elevate and ennoble. Munarriz the literary man,’ he says in conclusion, ‘is the Munarriz of the picture, the one being explained by the other.’ And read, also, what the _Boletin de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones_ contains concerning the two portraits of Doña Antonia de Zárate, now in the possession of Señora Vinda de Albacete: ‘But where Goya shows the most exquisite sensibility and profound psychology is in these two portraits of one person, in which he incorporates the whole story of a dreamer swayed in life and death by the highest ideals, a woman of a race of poets and artists, Antonia de Zárate. Though in the first portrait he represented her smiling and in perfect health, in the second he knew her existence was undermined by a treacherous disease which was to cause her death. Never have we felt more deeply the impression of pathos than before this presentment of a soul rather than a person, before this face enveloped in transparent veils, with life showing in the eyes, and in that life a melancholy realisation of approaching death.’

Goya’s portraits, as we have said, are so numerous that it is only possible to deal here with a brief selection of them. In his large and varied gallery he displays so much versatility that it appears impossible that they could all have been conceived by the same mind and painted by the same hand. His treatment is alternately rough to the verge of violence and as smooth as the work of a miniaturist; his tones are crude and heavy or luminous and glowing, as the sitter appeals to his mind; he makes his queen a confessed harlot and his little grandson the incarnation of dainty boyhood. The portrait of his wife, now in the Prado, is a work of the highest excellence, so are the beautiful representations of the Duchess of Alba, the vivid impression of Asensi, the delicious portrait of the Marquesa de Pontejos, the Gainsboroughesque study of the Conde de Florida Blanca, the equestrian painting of General Palafox, the dashing, almost contemptuously vivid likeness of Godoy, the striking portrait of Guillemardet so enthusiastically eulogised by M. León Legrange (_Gazette des Beaux-Arts_), and those of the Duke of Osuna, of Felix Colón, Jove-Llanos and Ventura Rodriguez, of Martincho and Romero, the bull-fighters, of Pignatelly, General Urrutia, of the royal children, and of himself, painted when still young--each portrait bears the stamp of Goya’s genius, each expresses an individuality in his individual style, each is finished because its effect is true.

Goya’s portrait of the Duke of San Carlos, the most loyal friend of the son of Maria Luisa, has won the admiration of many painters and critics. The head is beautifully painted, the posing is natural and graceful, the figure lives and breathes. For this ‘miracle of art,’ as Viñaza styles it, Goya used only a few colours, which he spread over the canvas with an energetic and grandiose brush, each stroke being the expression of an æsthetic thought and the perfection of the technique of painting. The portrait, ‘which legitimises Goya’s descent from Velazquez,’ is said to be like the work of Rembrandt in its clare-obscure, of Watteau in its correctness, and of Titian in its delicacy and freshness. But there is no end to the expressions of admiration which Goya has inspired. Eduardo Rosales went to Zaragoza annually to visit Goya’s portrait of the Duke of San Carlos, and on one occasion, when he had been lifted by a friend that he might study the face of the portrait, he is reported to have exclaimed, ‘My friend, such painting will never be seen again.’

In 1798 Goya was intrusted with the decoration of the newly built church of San Antonio de la Florida, which had sprung into existence in 1720 as a primitive hermitage, had been destroyed when the El Pardo road was made in 1768, was re-erected two years later, and in 1792 was replaced by the present elegant edifice, which was built at the expense of the royal patrimony, after the plans of the celebrated architect, Ventura Rodriguez. The outside of the building is of good architectural style, the interior is small and elegant, and well suited to the rank and fashion which frequented it. The Church was opened for worship on July 1, 1799, and we read that ‘Madrid went wild with excitement at the glory of Goya’s achievement.’

Don Juan de Dios de la Rada y Delgado, who supplied the text for the volume of aquafortis engravings of these frescoes which D. José Moria Galvan y Candela executed in 1897, tells us that they were wholly in accord with the conditions of the time. But the sentiment of Mr. Rothenstein is nearer to the truth when, in speaking of these frescoes, he says that he can remember nothing which gave him so clear an idea of Goya’s cynicism. ‘Imagine,’ he writes, ‘a coquettish little church with a white and gold interior, more like a boudoir than a shrine, but furnished with altar, and seats, and confessionals. One’s nostrils expect an odour of _frangipane_ rather than incense, and it must be admitted that Goya’s frescoes do not strike a discordant note in this indecorously holy place.’

The subject of the main composition covers the cupola, and contains upwards of a hundred figures considerably over life-size. The picture illustrates the miracle ascribed to St. Anthony of Padua, who restored to life the corpse of a murdered man in order that he might reveal the name of his assassin and rescue an innocent man who was about to be executed as the perpetrator of the crime. The scene is enclosed by a painted railing which surrounds the entire composition. We see the saint standing on an eminence against a luminous background. His life-giving words have just restored the corpse to consciousness. The man leans forward, supported in the arms of a companion, with his hands clasped in an attitude of profound veneration, his expressive face looking fixedly upon the saint with a gaze of surprise and gratitude. The central figures are surrounded by a motley crowd of men, women, and children, some of whom express their astonishment by eloquent gestures, while others appear indifferent to the miracle that is being performed, and one or two frolicsome boys are seen astride the figured railing. On the spandrils, the intrados, the curvilineal triangles of the arches, and behind the high altar, are groups of angels and cherubs. The angels are beautifully clothed and almost wanton in their human loveliness, the babes are entirely without the illusion of divine origin. It has been said that in this composition Goya perfectly interpreted the spirit of the Church de la Florida; certain it is that these angels with ‘the skin of a camellia, eyes of fire, and the beauty of a harlot,’ which move with audacious freedom of attitude, ‘not in pure spheres of blessedness, but in an atmosphere of atoms of gold illuminated by an Asiatic sun, are the strangest and most beautiful creatures that ever adorned a consecrated house.’

‘The frescoes of la Florida,’ comments C. Gasquoine Hartley, ‘are yet another witness of the truthful humour of Goya’s insight, but not one of his countrymen realised the irreverent irony of his work.’ ‘The figures are as full of piquant intention,’ declared Richard Muther, ‘as can be found in the most erotic paintings of Fragonard.... It is an artistic _can-can_; it is Casanova transferred to colour. All that the Church painting of the past had created is despised, forsaken; and this satire upon the Church and all its works was written in the land of Zurbarán, of Murillo.’ The Conde de la Viñaza alludes to Goya as an artist who painted pictures with religious subjects, but not religious pictures. ‘I do not know,’ he says, ‘a more profane master than this Velazquez, Rembrandt, Vicelli and Veronese rolled into one.’ And he instances his monumental painting at la Florida to illustrate his contention: ‘An admirable energy, the most splendid scale of tones. What relief! What a magic of colour! What a beautiful lesson the light of nature receives there! On the other hand, what lack of religious feeling and spirituality in those frescoes!’ And having denounced in the angels the silkiness of their skins, the brilliance of their eyes, and the wantonness of their beauty, he adds, ‘the miracles of the exemplary man of Padua are familiarly treated as a spectacle of wandering rope-dancers might be!’

It has been said that the King was incensed against the artist for introducing renowned ladies of his court in the faces of the winged archangels, and it is generally believed that the most aristocratic persons of the capital are represented in the frescoes, but if Charles IV. resented his choice of models, he had a most amiable way of expressing his displeasure. Goya himself, writing to Zapater, admitted that ‘the King and Queen are mad on your friend Goya,’ but the madness took the form of a royal order, dated October 31, 1799, which reads: ‘H.M. wishing to reward your distinguished merit and to give in person a testimony that may serve as a stimulus to all professors, of how much he appreciates your talent and knowledge of the noble art of painting, has been pleased to appoint you his chief painter of the Chamber, at a yearly salary of 50,000 reals, which you will receive from this date free of rights, and also 500 ducats a year for a carriage: and it is also his pleasure that you occupy the house now inhabited by Don Mariano Maëlla should he die first,’ etc.

Certainly the frescoes in his own day were extolled as the most important work ever done by Goya’s marvellous brush; he closed the eighteenth century with creations that won for him his greatest contemporary fame and raised him to the summit of his art. If nothing could be further removed from religious inspiration, nothing human could reveal more enchanting beauty, more exquisite grace. These frescoes were praised as ‘an inimitable symphony of light and colour.’ It is not in our province either to accept or to refute the claim that ‘they raise the most common things of Goya’s time to the high spheres of Spanish mystic realism.’ Goya’s contemporaries did not realise that the paintings outraged the canons of propriety and probability, and in later times Señor Rada finds that the painter, in this work, rises always to the regions of mystery, where only genius can penetrate, and responds to the peculiar influence of a temple which seems rather to inspire loving human aspirations, than mystic thoughts of infinite abstraction. ‘Apart from the fact that Goya was a believer and respectful to all that pertained to religion,’ urges Señor Rada, ‘in the principal subject of this painting (the “Cupola”) he is as manifestly mystic and delicate as any painter of the spiritual school. In the central group the risen man partakes of both realism and religious unction. The expression could not be better, nor could the attitude of the saint be more dignified. Apart from this in the other groups, he copied what he was wont to observe in popular gatherings, as he saw it, as it was, as it always will be.’

Goya’s Spanish apologists may well be justified in their contention that his originality forced him to disregard the classic rules and mannerism of traditional Spanish religious art. They see no impropriety or extravagance in surrounding the figure of a revered saint with a crowd of roysterers, prostitutes, cut-purses and Manzanares rascals. And, after all, the point is scarcely worth arguing. Again, when it is protested that Goya’s archangels and seraphim were rather beautiful women than angelic spirits--well! what better conception could there be of angels than the perfections of a charming woman? That is Señor Rada’s retort: ‘The naturalist Goya, surrounded by the seductive beauty of his time, could not conceive or even presume that the chosen beings who sing eternal praises in the ethereal regions of celestial glory were any different. More in accord doubtless, with our pious traditions and with Christian spiritual belief are the glories of Juan de Juanes and Murillo; but each artist has his peculiar temperament as well as his special gamut of colour, and to ask Goya to paint angels like those great Christian artists would be the same as asking the painters of a previous epoch to paint pictures of popular scenes like Goya’s.’

The logic of the foregoing is presumably sound, although the conclusion seems to us to support those who contend that Goya’s temperament rendered him an unsuitable person to translate religious episodes into colour. We remember, as Señors Rada and Pedro de Madrazo assert, that Goya was ‘a believer’ and ‘respectful in everything pertaining to religion,’ and we recall also that in their joint will the painter and his wife describe themselves as ‘firmly believing and confessing the mystery of the Holy Trinity ... and all other mysteries and sacraments, believed and confessed by our Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Mother Church, in whose true faith and belief we have lived.’ But we cannot, at the same time, forget that Goya’s detestation of the priesthood was violent and unresting. If he caught the spirit of ecstasy in his picture of San José de Calasanz receiving the Host at the hands of a priest, he also painted a representation of Santas Justa and Rufina. This picture has been described as the most profane and inappropriate work of the Aragonese genius. It is stated that he selected as his models a pair of well-known _cocottes_ of Madrid, giving, it is said, the caustic, uncanonical explanation, ‘I will cause the faithful to worship vice!’ Goya may have called himself an orthodox conformer to the national church, but his contempt for his ecclesiastical patrons and those who practised the devotions which he mechanically professed, is avowed.

But apart from their religious significance, or their lack of it, these frescoes of the Church of San Antonio de la Florida reveal Goya at his best as a daring draughtsman and fine colourist. The energy, the spontaneity, the light and the relief, the magic of his paint--all are revealed in this work, which occupied him only three months. And what better proof could one desire of the truth of his own contention: ‘In nature colour exists no more than line--there is only light and shade.’ Goya knew how to produce abundant life with simply white lead, the black of smoke, green and vermillion. Richness of colour does not consist in an infinite variety of tints, but in the harmonious variety of tones and in the skilful selection of the key in which the picture is painted. Here Goya surpassed himself in the effect he produced with a palette that was severe in its simplicity, but the processes employed by the master to obtain his wonderfully vivid and charming tones were so varied that they cannot be exactly determined. Of the result, Paul Lafond writes, it is ‘as true as Velazquez, as energetic and as light as Rembrandt, as delicate as Titian, as spiritual as Tiepolo, with infinite perspectives like those of Tiepolo and Veronese, and as refined as Watteau.’

The painting of the frescoes of San Antonio de la Florida won for Goya, as we have seen, the coveted office of first painter to the Court. It was at this same time he began to paint less and to take up the needle as a new force of expression. His first work was the series of designs known as ‘Los Caprichos’ in which the spectator is transported into some ‘unheard of, impossible, but still real world’--a world peopled with dapper _majas_, handsome hidalgos, hideous old men and hags more horrible than the witch of Endor, gluttonous priests, spectres and sorceresses, devils and desperadoes and corpses, all the myriad diabolical and terrifying shapes and phantasies in which Goya set down his vision of humanity. The origin, the inspiration and the object of these etchings are still matters of speculation. It is generally agreed that the painter executed the first drafts for these plates after his return from San Lucar. His deafness aggravated by a serious illness, from which he made a slow and painful recovery, obliged him to give up the fatiguing work with palette and brush, and it may well be that he, whose spirit never rested and whose hand was never idle, fell into a habit of preserving his impressions on paper in order to distract his tormented imagination from brooding over his sufferings. It was at a later date that he transferred these drawings on to the copper plates. It may be reasonable to assume, as some have done, that the part of philosopher which he had developed leisurely during his days at Court, as well as the vein of moralist and castigator of vice, was quickened in him by satiety and physical pain. The Conde de la Viñaza appears to believe that Goya suddenly awakened to his power as a caricaturist, and that, irritated at the moral ugliness of his contemporaries, and at the vile coterie which surrounded the King and Queen, he began to inveigh unflinchingly against lasciviousness, covetousness, rapacity, hypocrisy, and ignorance, against the court parasite and the court harlot, the miser and the monk, the women who sold their daughters and the monsters who bought them, against insolent pomp, ecclesiastical rottenness and venal stupidity. Yet probably the view of Gautier is nearer the truth. He assumes that the now popular painter was ‘merely producing so many capricious sketches, when he was in truth drawing the portrait and writing the history of Spain of former days, under the belief that he was serving the ideas and creed of modern times. His caricatures will soon be looked upon in the light of historical monuments.’

Extraordinary as these pictures are by reason of their fancy, their beauty, their saturnine wit, their ‘Gargantuan spirit,’ as well as by the technical skill and originality they display, they are even more extraordinary by reason of the favour with which they were at first received by the people against whom they were directed. At first the plates were issued separately and were passed from hand to hand among the etcher’s friends. But in 1799, probably the year in which the series was completed, a prospectus was issued, advertising the publication of an edition of seventy-two plates. Goya, for unknown reasons, objected to this edition, and the issue was never made. In the meantime the satire of these tumultuous cartoons was discovered by the objects of his ridicule. Godoy, the old Duchess of Benavente, the Queen’s favourites, were the first to be identified, then effigies of the Queen herself and her illustrious lord were recognised upon the plates. The scandal of these allusions aroused an outburst of indignation, instigated, in great measure, by the caricatured and crucified clergy. The office of the Inquisition was moved to take action, and Goya’s popularity and influence were powerless to avert the inevitable catastrophe. Rescue came from the most unexpected quarter. In 1803 the King caused an edition of 240 copies of 80 plates, which had already been printed, as well as the plates themselves, to be acquired by the state, with an order that he had commanded their publication.

It is difficult to account for this splendid action from such a King as Charles IV. Was he so impressed by the merits of these etchings that he was prompted to rescue them from the Inquisition in the interests of art--a magnanimity of spirit ‘of which his character gives no promise’? Probably he was merely insensible to the satire of the pictures. The ‘Caprichos’ were dedicated to the monarch by the artist--a subtle jest on the stupidity of the King, who, Muther concludes, ‘was not even in a position to grasp the meaning of the plates.’ We learn that Charles remunerated Goya by granting his son a pension of 12,000 reals. A reproduction of the letter from the painter referring to this arrangement is as follows:--

TRANSLATION

YOUR EXCELLENCY,--I am in receipt of H.M. Royal Order which your
excellency communicated to me on the 6th inst., accepting the
offer of my work, the caprices on eighty copper plates engraved
with aquafortis by my hand, which I will hand to the Royal
Calcografia with the lot of prints which I had printed by way of
precaution amounting to 240 copies of 80 prints each copy, in order
not to defraud H.M. in the least and for my own satisfaction as to
my mode of procedure.

I am very grateful for the pension of twelve thousand reals which
H.M. has been pleased to concede to my son, for which I give my
best thanks to H.M. and to your excellency.

Your excellency has not replied to a letter of mine, in which I
said that the portraits were finished, and also the copy of your
excellency’s by Esteve which only lacked the inscription for which
he has asked me several times. I also suggested that if your
excellency approved I would get the frames made for the originals
and would myself go and put them where your excellency might order,
so that you might have the pleasure of finding them in their
places.

I only desire your excellency’s orders and that you keep well. May
God preserve your excellency’s valuable life for many
years.--Madrid, October 9, 1803.--Your excellency’s obedient and
grateful servant,

FRANCISCO DE GOYA.

To his Excellency Señor Don Miguel Cayetano Soler.

The technical excellence of the Caprichos makes them comparable with those of Rembrandt, while in their meaning and character they may be likened to the work of Daumier. There are the peculiar qualities of Goya’s etching, which recall the truth and naturalness of Fernando Boll, the movement and life of Lievens and Konninck, and the expression and charm of Von Vliet? These artists, whose best individual qualities are all combined in Goya, were pupils of Rembrandt. ‘Only Hokusai,’ writes Mr. Rothenstein, ‘was capable of such monstrous gaiety, such stinging satire, and he alone could have lent probability to such monstrous phantasy; Hogarth was too sermonising, Rowlandson too rollicking; a certain diabolical side of his nature, which Goya allowed to be seen both in the “Caprichos” and “The Disasters,” has probably prevented his etchings gaining a footing in England.’ Certain it is that Goya’s prints are rarely to be met with in this country--a fact that caused the writer of this book to spare no effort in order to include in the illustrations, reproductions of every etching and lithograph, as well as of every portrait or picture of Goya’s, of which he could secure an impression.

It is one thing to admire, even to understand, the technique of the ‘Caprichos,’ but to understand the precise significance of many of the plates is almost impossible. Perhaps the titles printed by Goya beneath the plates are the best guide to their meaning. The only reward to be derived from reading ingenious meanings into the prints is the personal interest one finds in the exercise. The series may be divided into three classes; the first are humorous satires of the foolishness and rottenness of the life of the period; the second are scathing assaults upon the ignorance and greed of the priesthood and the corruptness of the civic institutions; and the last are visions of witches and demons, which may be classed as pure phantasies. There is a depth of meaning in every plate, for Goya reproduces for us in them not only what he has seen, but what he has felt. The first plate illustrates a marriage of convenience, and we are shown the girl-bride being presented to her hideous suitor by her more hideous mother. Over and over again we are presented with this type of the ‘complaisant mother,’ which has been described by Théophile Gautier in illuminating prose. ‘It is impossible’ he writes, ‘to fancy anything more grotesquely horrible, more viciously deformed. Each of these frightful old shrews unites in her own person the ugliness of the seven capital sins; compared to them the Prince of Darkness himself is pretty. Just fancy whole ditches and counterscarps of wrinkles; eyes like live coals that have been extinguished in blood; noses like the neck of an alembic covered with warts and other excrescences; nostrils like those of an hippopotamus rendered formidable by stiff bristles; whiskers like a tiger’s; a mouth like the slit in the top of a money-box, contracted by a horrible and convulsive grin; a something between the spider and the multiped which makes you feel the same kind of disgust as if you had placed your foot upon the belly of a toad.’ The description is horrible even as Goya’s engravings are horrible, and as excellently true as the work by which it was inspired.

It is not possible in the space at our command to review these ‘Caprichos’ in detail, and fortunately it is not necessary. The reader can examine the plates for himself and study their details. He will remark the skill with which the engraver endows ‘The Garroted Man’ with its sombre, gruesome tone; the sense of the unavailing, despairing effort with which the living skeleton in ‘And yet they do not go’ (Plate 369) supports the slab of stone which must inevitably fall and crush the crouching, scarcely human wretches who anticipate their fate with expressions of such lurid horror. One can feel the violence of the wind that buffets the women in ‘A Bad Night’; we enter into the terror of the woman who is employed in her hideous task in ‘Tooth Hunting.’ Here indeed, ‘horror confronts us; corruptness is imagined with an unapproachable depth of grotesqueness.’ In all the realm of art there is nothing to compare with the horror and grotesquerie of these Caprices.

Goya’s next work was the thirty-three plates of ‘The Tauromachia.’ This series of engravings was so brilliant in execution and appealed so strongly in their theme and treatment to the Spanish national affection for the bull-ring, that doubtless they would have brought the etcher even greater contemporary fame than the larger series, but for some unexplained reason, they were not publicly issued until after his death and the death of his only surviving legitimate son. In the ‘Tauromachia’ Goya made less use of aquatint and aquafortis, and, as in his later etchings, relied more and more upon the needle to produce his effects. These scenes of the bull-ring represent the different phases of the combat and the surpassing feats of its most famous exponents. The ‘Caprices’ may appeal more strongly in some respects, but the drawing in the plates of the ‘Tauromachia’ is extremely light and facile, and the illusion of vigorous movement is seen in them all.

In 1803 Goya was fifty-seven years old. The corruption in high places, against which he had hurled his darts, was fast driving Spain into the grasp of the world-power which was menacing all Europe. Napoleon’s ambitious designs embraced the mastership of the Peninsula, and he was already maturing his plans to that end. In 1803 the English and French were again at war. Napoleon demanded, under the treaty of St. Ildefonso, that Spain should declare war against England. Godoy strove fiercely to resist the will of the tyrant. Napoleon ordered the dismissal of Godoy. Spain purchased her neutrality in hard cash, and Godoy was retained. In 1804 Napoleon was proclaimed Emperor, and the neutrality of the Spaniards was reduced to such a farce beneath the grinding importunities of the imperial ally that Pitt declared war against Spain in December of that year. The battle of Trafalgar was fought on October 21, 1805, but before the end of the year Napoleon had entered Vienna and won the battle of Austerlitz. Before the awful menace of his growing power, Godoy sued for the favour of the conqueror in gold drawn from the Spanish funds. The Emperor accepted the money without relaxing his animus against the despised favourite, who was forced to approach England with proposals for an anti-French coalition. His overtures were ignored. The Queen and the King heaped new honours upon the Prince of the Peace, but his end and that of his august patrons was near. Ferdinand’s party was working the country into a ferment of hatred against Godoy, and Napoleon’s inflexible aversion sealed his doom. In 1807 Ferdinand truckled to the ‘Scourge of Europe’ by asking for a lady of Napoleon’s family for a wife, while Godoy urged upon Napoleon the occupation of Portugal as a preliminary to the introduction of French troops into Spain. In October 1807 Portugal proving refractory, Junot and a strong force encamped on Spanish soil and were made welcome by the Prince of the Asturias and the Prince of the Peace, both of whom regarded the invasion of the French as a friendly move, in support of their respective interests.

In the same month the Court was stricken by the exposure of the plot and counterplot planned by the rascally favourite and the intriguing Crown Prince. Godoy was charged by Ferdinand with the intention of killing the King and his family and seizing the throne; Ferdinand was surprised in a plot which embraced the imprisonment if not the death of his father. The Prince of the Asturias was placed under arrest, and the King applied to Napoleon for his advice. Junot marched into Portugal; French troops poured into Spain; the Portuguese Regent, at the advice of Lord Strangford, transferred his court to Brazil. On March 17, 1808, the troops, in favour of Ferdinand, prevented Godoy from leaving Aranguez, and two days later threw him, bruised and bleeding, at the feet of the Prince of the Asturias, who gave his father to understand that, by virtue of the presence in the capital of his friends the French, he was absolute master of the situation. Charles IV. signed a decree which made Ferdinand VII. sovereign of Spain. A few days later he put his name to a private withdrawal of his abdication; and this document was forwarded to Napoleon, with a letter offering to conform to whatever the Emperor might order with regard to him, his queen, and the Prince of the Peace. Napoleon came south towards Spain. Ferdinand, who hastened north to meet him, entered Bayonne to find himself a prisoner. Charles IV., with Maria Luisa and Godoy, followed to Bayonne, and Ferdinand was compelled to restore the crown to his father, who transferred it to Napoleon. The cash consideration the King was to receive for his sovereignty was never paid.

While these base traffickings were occupying the King and his family, the gallant loyalists of Madrid had risen against the French and suffered massacre on the terrible Dos de Mayo. Once again the country was in arms; the Spaniards fought--to instance only the sieges of Zaragoza and Valencia--with superb valour, but the Junta continued its servile negotiations with Napoleon, and Joseph Buonaparte, King of Naples, was summoned by his brother to rule over Spain. On July 9, 1808, Joseph I. set foot in his new kingdom. On the 17th the French were defeated in the battle of Baileu, and the victorious Spanish troops advanced over the Sierra Morena to Madrid. The new king fled the capital. Napoleon in person took command of the army which was to reconquer Spain, and advanced into the heart of Castile. The left division of the Spanish army was defeated on November 11, the right was driven into the mountains of Aragon, the centre was completely crushed at Tudela on November 26. A fortnight later the Emperor entered Madrid, and Joseph I. was restored to the throne of Spain.

Goya’s position was rendered acutely difficult by these drastic changes. The first painter of the exiled King, the favourite of his dispersed courtiers, what could he do in the court of the hated Joseph Buonaparte? It may be surmised that ‘the good old Goya,’ as Gautier familiarly styles him, hated the new order of things, but he was no visionary patriot burning with the fire of useless sacrifice. His love of country was not love of Charles IV. or his son; he loved Spain not less because Maria Luisa and Godoy were out of it. And as he asked himself what action he should take, he saw the Prince of the Asturias submit himself to the new ruler, and with him Jove-Llanos, Mazarrado and Urquijo, the Dukes of Fernan Nuñez and del Parque, the Count of Santa Colonna, the Cardinal of Bourbon--to mention a few only among the nobles. Goya’s comrades also, the Court painters, Mariano Maëlla, Francisco Ramos, and Pablo Racio, acknowledged the ‘intrusive king’! Goya hesitated no longer. He took the oath of allegiance to Joseph I. He was made a knight of the Legion of Honour. He painted the usurper’s portrait, and some time later accepted, with Napoli and Maëlla, the commission to select from the treasures of the royal gallery fifty of the most beautiful pictures which were to be sent to the Louvre.

But though the old order had changed and Goya had changed with it, his spirit was full of bitterness. He had witnessed the butchery and slaughter of the French soldiers; he hated the sound of the clanking of the spurs of Murat’s hussars on the pavements of Madrid.