Age of Revolution
Francisco Goya (1746–1828)
Spanish Romanticism painter.
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes rose from the Aragonese town of Fuendetodos to become First Court Painter to the Spanish crown, painting flattering — and quietly unflattering — likenesses of Charles IV and his family. A grave illness in 1792-93 left him permanently deaf, and his art turned inward and darker: the biting print series 'Los Caprichos' (1799) satirized the follies, superstitions, and cruelties of his society.
The Napoleonic invasion and the Peninsular War (1808-1814) made Goya the first great modern witness to atrocity. 'The Third of May 1808' and the etched 'Disasters of War' stripped battle of all heroism, showing only victims and executioners. In old age, deaf and disillusioned, he covered the walls of his farmhouse — the Quinta del Sordo — with the nightmarish 'Black Paintings', among them the horrifying 'Saturn Devouring His Son', works he never meant for public eyes.
Goya bridges the court art of the eighteenth century and the raw subjectivity of the nineteenth. His fusion of sharp observation with private terror, and his conviction that reason and its monsters are inseparable, made him a founding figure of Romanticism and a direct ancestor of Manet and later modern painting. He died in self-imposed exile in Bordeaux in 1828.
The words the record keeps using: unflinching, sardonic, haunted, ferocious, compassionate, sublime, disenchanted.
At a glance
- Lived 1746–1828
- Origin Spanish
- Worked in Madrid
- Era Age of Revolution
- Movements Romanticism
- Mediums Oil on canvas, Engraving and etching
- Techniques Etching with drypoint, Aquatint, Alla prima (wet-in-wet)
Works in the archive
- The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (Los Caprichos, plate 43), 1799 (Impression from Los Caprichos (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, among others))
The most famous plate of Goya's satirical series 'Los Caprichos'. An artist slumps asleep at his desk while owls and bats — creatures of the night and of unreason — swarm up behind him. The title is etched into the desk… - The Family of Charles IV, 1800 (Museo del Prado, Madrid)
The royal family stands in a row, glittering with sashes and jewels, while Goya himself works at a large canvas in the shadows at left — a nod to Velázquez's 'Las Meninas'. The likenesses are unsparingly candid, the… - The Third of May 1808, 1814 (Museo del Prado, Madrid)
French soldiers execute Madrid citizens by lantern-light in reprisal for the uprising of the previous day. The kneeling man in a white shirt flings his arms wide in a pose echoing the crucifixion, his eyes wide with… - Saturn Devouring His Son, 1820 (Museo del Prado, Madrid (transferred from the Quinta del Sordo))
One of the Black Paintings Goya painted directly onto the walls of his own house and never exhibited. The god Saturn, wild-eyed in the dark, crams the bloody, headless body of his child into his mouth. It is among the…
What was said
El sueño de la razón produce monstruos
La fantasía abandonada de la razón produce monstruos imposibles: unida con ella es madre de las artes y origen de las maravillas.
Announcing the sale of Los Caprichos, Goya described the prints as a censure of the innumerable follies and vices common in society, and of the prejudices and deceits authorized by custom, ignorance, or self-interest.
Lineage
Learned from Diego Velázquez
What would Francisco make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Francisco Goya", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Francisco · Keep a life moment the way Francisco would · Pictures made after Francisco