The French Revolution And Its Influence On Art

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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The life-story of Goya is as full of storm and stress as that of his unhappy country, which between 1788 and 1815 saw more misery and more changes of government than any other country in battle-scarred Europe. Under the rule of Charles IV and his depraved consort, Queen Maria Louisa, Spain was in a miseable condition; its Court was a frivolous, shallow imitation of Versailles, and its monarchy and government were even more rotten and more corrupt than those of France under Louis XVI. A young lieutenant of the Guards, Manuel Godoy, was made Prime Minister because he was the Queen’s favorite lover, and the King was a puppet in the hands of this Spanish Messalina. Public offices were openly sold to the highest bidder, and eighteen thousand priests drained the purse of the people and stifled their intellects. Art seemd dead and past the hope of revival till Goya came to Madrid.

Francisco José de Goya Lucientes was born on March 30, 1746, that is to say, twelve years after Romney, and ten years before Raeburn. He was the son of a peasant in a village in Aragon, and legend relates that, like Giotto, he was found drawing sheep by an amateur who recognized the boy’s talent and sent him in his fourteenth year as pupil to a painter in Saragossa. There the boy grew up strong, handsome, wild, and passionate, continually involved in love affairs and quarrels. In one of the last, three men were left wounded and bleeding, and as a result of this midnight affray Goya had to leave the city hurriedly.

In 1766 he was in Madrid, and there his adventurous disposition soon got him into trouble. He was wounded in some love quarrel, placed under police supervision, and chafing at this restraint he escaped from the city with a band of bull-fighters and sailed to Italy. At the end of the sixties he was in Rome, where he appears to have been much more interested in the teeming life of the people than in antiquities of the city. Here again his amorousness got him into trouble, for it is said that one night he made his way into a nunnery, was nearly captured, and only escaped the gallows by a headlong flight from the city.

In 1771 he returned to Saragosa and found shelter in a monastery, where he seems to have reformed his manner of living, for four years later this scapegrace adventurer, the hero of a hundred fights, reappeared in Madrid as a respectable citizen, married to the sister of Bayen, a painter of good standing. Through his brother-in-law he got to know people of a better class, and he was finally introduced to the Court and permitted to paint the portrait of Charles III.

Goya’s pictures of this period reflect the manners of the Spanish Court, for pictures like ‘The Swing’ and ‘Blind Man’s Buff’ at Madrid are obviously imitations of Watteau and his school, as the Spanish Court imitated the artificiality of Versailles, only Goya, a cynic from his youth, does not give his figures the daintness of the Frenchmen.

With almost brutal realism he depicts the rouge on the women’s checks and the pencilling of their eyebrows, and seems to take a delight in unmasking their falseness and dissipation. While he was intelligent enough to perceive the rottenness of Spanish society, Goya was no moralist himself and lived the life of his time. Countless stories are told of his relations with women of high society, and Goya is said to have been the terror of all their husbands. In this connection one inevitably thinks of his famous double picture at Madrid, ‘The Maja Nude’ and ‘The Maja Clothed,’ the latter being an almost exact reproduction of the former with the garmets added, and these are so filmy, so expressive of the limbs underneath, that the second picture has justly been said to reveal a woman ‘naked in spite of her dress.’ The story runs that the lady was the Duchess of Alva, and that when the Duke desired to see Goya’s work, the painter hurriedly produced the clothed portrait and concealed the other.

The French Revolution And Its Influence On Art (continued)