(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:
A more subtle example of Goya’s anti-clerical tendency is the little picture in the National Gallery, ‘The Bewitched’, in which, while professing to do no more than paint a stage scene from a popular comedy of the time, the artist shows us a priest frightened by demons in forms of a goat and jackasses.
Like most of the intellectual men in Spain, Goya had at first welcomed the coming of Napoleon, for anything seemed promise a hope of better things than the old regime. But, later, the piteous spectacle of his country in the throes of warfare seemed to rouse the patriot in him, and he began to champion its rights in a series of the most moving paintings and engravings. In 1810 he began to execute a series of engravings entitled ‘The Disasters of War’, which were absolutely a new thing in art. Hitherto artists, with few exceptions, had shown only the imposing side of war, its panoply and splendor, its daring and heroism. Goya was the first artist to make a deliberate and systematic impeachment of Militarism. Not only did he refuse to glorify the old adage that ‘it is sweet and decorous to die for one’s country,’ but he persistently showed all the blood and misery with which military glory was bought. In his engravings of the war he shows the unchaining of the ‘human beast,’ and his prints of the torturing of prisoners and the shooting of deserters are ghastly in their revelation of raging madness and the distortions of death agonies.
In his paintings also Goya told the terrible story of the tragedies which ensued when the Spanish volunteers took up arms against Napoleon’s soldiery. There is no more awful war picture in the world than Goya’s painting of an incident in 1808, in which we see the gleam of the gun-barrels, and poor wretches who have been condemned by court-martial falling forward prone before the musket-fire of the troops. The despair of the condemned, and the cold-blooded energy of the executioners are appalling.
Yet while he lamented the sufferings of the patriots during the Peninsular War, Goya could not rejoice at the restoration of the Bourbons after the fall of Napoleon. For when King Ferdinand returned to Madrid in 1814, Goya saw that all hope of liberalism and freedom of thought had vanished, and that the powers of darkness, which for the time had been scared away, again settled on the land and obscured truth, progress, and enlightenment. The last ‘disaster of the war’ was the resettlement of the Bourbons, who had ‘learnt nothing and forgotten nothing,’ on the throne of Spain, and Goya with his old fearlessness expressed his view of the matter in his engraving ‘The Death of Truth,’ in which he showed thte naked figure of Truth suffering martyrdom at the hands of the priests.
We might expect that this outspoken work would have proved too much even for the most stupid, priest-ridden Court to swallow, but nothing that Goya could do ever brought home to royalty what the artist really thought of them and their government. King Ferdinand confirmed Goya’s appointment as Court Painter, and even persuaded him to paint a portrait of him in the purple mantle of empire, but now the artist himself was too old and too sick at heart to play the hypocrite at Court and paint grandees with his tongue in his cheek. Gradually Goya withdrew from the public life and established himself in a simple country house on the outskirts of Madrid. His wife and son were both dead, since 1791 he had himself been afflicted with deafness, and in this villa the lonely painter lived out his life in company with his art. His last protest against the tendencies of the time were some small paintings of the interiors of prisons and torture-chambers, in which he reminds us that the Inquisition had again raised its head under King Ferdinand. Among his last works were scenes of bull-fights, of the details of which Goya, in his youth, had acquired a professional knowledge. Greatly as all humanitarians must detest this horrid sport, its color and movement appeal to the artistic sense, and the decorative aspect of the scene is the dominant note in Goya’s renderings of this subject.
After nine years of this lonely life Goya seems to have felt himself no longer very secure in Spain. Perhaps he feared that the clerics would in the end perceive his purpose and have their revenge on him. At all events, in 1824 he sought and obtained leave of absence for six weeks to visit the sulphur springs of Plombières in Lorraine on account of his gout. But this appears to have been merely an excuse to get out of Spain, for he never went to Plombières, but after visiting Paris, settled at Bordeaux, where, on April 16, 1828, he died as the result of a stroke of apoplexy. In his last years he was not only stone deaf but half blind, and consequently his creative work in France was small, but one engraving remains to show that the old cynic never swerved from his faith and still had hope for the future. ‘Lux ex tenebris’ is the pregnant title of this work of his old age, and in it he shows us a shaft of light falling on a dark spot of earth (Spain?) and scaring away from it owls, ravens—and priests!
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