The French Revolution And Its Influence On Art

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

When Charles IV came to the throne Goya became still more firmly established in Court favor, though he produced the most impudent portraits of royalty that have ever been painted. Nowhere can we find a more pitiless exposure of serene stupidity than his ‘Charles IV on Horeseback’. ‘He sits there, asthmatic and fat, upon his fat asthmatic horse.....like a Moloch,’ says Dr Muther, ‘an evil god who has battened upon the life blood of his people.’ When he painted the Queen Maria Louisa, Goya portrayed her as the brazen old courtesan she was; he shows up the Crown Prince as a sly, spiteful, hypocritical meddler, and the favorite minister Godoy as a nincompoop and a panderer. When the French novelist Gautier first saw Goya’s large portrait group of the Spanish Royal Family and its favorites, his comment was, ‘A grocer’s family who have won the big lottery prize’; and that is exactly the impression the picture gives us, a collection of stupid, ill-bred people who owe their fine clothes and position to no talent or merit of their own but to sheer luck. It is amazing that this daring satirist of royalty should have gone unpunished and unreproved, but the King and his family circle were themselves too stupid to realize that the artist was holding them all up to the ridicule of the world.

As, while outwardly a courtier, he insidiously undermined the pretences of the Spanish monarchy, so while appearing to respect the observances of Catholicism, Goya surreptitiously attacked the Church which was blinding the eyes of the people. In 1797 he began to produce a series of engravings which, under the title of ‘Caprices,’ pretended to be nothing more than flights of fancy, but which were in reality biting satires on the social, political, ecclesiastical conditions of his age. He drew devout women with rolling eyes worshipping a scarecrow, priests drawling out the Litany with obvious indifference, and in one fantastic plate—which he had the audacity to dedicate to the King!—he showed a corpse rising from the grave and writing with his dead finger the word Nada, i.e ‘Nothingness.’ It was tantamount to saying that the hope of immortality held out to the people was only a murmuring, while kings and priests grew fat at their expense. If the Court and high ecclesiastics were too stupid to comprehend Goya’s message, the people understood, for the revolutionary era was at hand.

The French Revolution And Its Influence On Art (continued)