Part 2

He now returned to Saragossa, for the sake of his aged parents, with whom he spent the closing months of the year 1774, after which he once more set forth for Madrid. There he again fell in with his faithful friend, Bayeu, discovered himself to be in love with the latter’s sister, Josefa Bayeu, and married her a few months later.

His brother-in-law again offered to introduce him to Mengs, and this time, weary no doubt of adventures, he accepted the offer. The Superintendent of Fine-Arts gave him a most cordial reception. We have already had occasion to refer to the almost despotic authority which Mengs at this period exerted over Spanish art and the singular direction in which he had guided it. In the decorative works which he was conducting in the palaces at Madrid and Aranjuez, there was, in the words of M. Charles Yriarte, “nothing but an agglomeration of struggles of Titans, apotheoses, triumphs of Hercules, and glorifications of Ceres; but Goya soon came to scale Olympus, and turn Venus into a manola, and substitute his frightful _Saturn devouring his Children_, in his _Quinta_ [Goya’s country house], for the figure of Father Time, with his traditional stooping shoulders, partaking of his progeny with prudence and circumspection.”

Up to this moment Goya had been far more intent upon observing and learning than upon painting; he had as yet produced nothing, and no one even suspected the powerful faculties that were dormant in him. More as a favour to Bayeu than from any personal confidence, Mengs entrusted him with the composition of some cartoons for the royal manufactory of Santa Barbara. Goya set to work, and from the start broke squarely away from the superannuated tradition of the Superintendent. Throwing aside the entire paraphernalia of mythology, he confined his cartoons wholly to subjects borrowed from national life. In this work he gave free rein to the full spontaneity of his talent and to his riotous imagination, and in the course of it he revealed the full wealth of his imagination and his marvellous instinct for decorative art. The result was a revelation: a genuine ovation greeted these modern compositions, so full of life and movement and colour. Mengs himself, who was not lacking either in intelligence or in taste, was frankly delighted and warmly congratulated the young artist. At Court and in the city nothing was talked of but Goya and his cartoons; from this moment he entered upon his true role as national painter.

This first attempt had the result of enlightening Goya as to his own powers. Not that he had previously mistrusted them, but he had feared that he was not yet sufficiently equipped to venture upon a public appearance. But on the strength of the success of his cartoons he took stock of himself as follows: “He was thirty years of age and he realized now that he had only to take his brush in hand in order to become a great painter.”

Henceforth, throughout a period of more than fifty years, he was destined to produce unweariedly, trying his hand at the most diverse types, alternating between painting and engraving; and in his life-work, which, taken as a whole, is one of the vastest and most varied that ever came from any artist, he has given us the measure of his prodigious fecundity.

He made his debut in genre painting, and he drew his inspiration straight from the life of the people. Spain, for that matter, furnished an exceptional nutriment for his order of talent; land that it was of vivid light, ardent colour, picturesque manners and curious costumes, it was well designed to fire that vigorous and impulsive nature to the highest pitch of enthusiasm. And hence, while Madrid looked on and marvelled, there came in swift succession from his brush a whole series of pictures saturated with local colour: bull fights, attacks of bandits, clandestine meetings, processions, masquerades, all the life of the Spanish city and the Spanish highway, reproduced in piquant, accurate, brightly coloured scenes, of charming naïveté and exquisite naturalness, replete with vivacity and riotous fancy.

On closer inspection it would be easy to find a certain amount of incorrectness in the drawing. Some of his bulls, especially, are endowed with anatomical proportions that at best only approximate the truth. But they have such spirit, such vigour, such nimbleness, such furious agility, that we feel ourselves snatched up and borne along by this living whirlwind, this intensity of movement, almost as though we were bodily present in the arena where the blood-stained drama is in the course of enactment. As to the colouring, it is very light and very luminous and silvery.

Almost at the same period Goya published a collection of etchings in which he had reproduced the most celebrated masterpieces of Velazquez. It was a daring venture, but it had no terrors for the young artist. Goya did no injustice to Velazquez; he succeeded most felicitously in reproducing in these etchings not only the design, but the colour values and characteristic spirit of his model. This magnificent series, executed during the year 1778, comprises sixteen pieces, which to-day are of inestimable value.

That same year the Franciscans went to great expense to decorate their church; they appealed to the most renowned artists which Madrid at that period possessed. Goya was entrusted with the decoration of a chapel which required two paintings. The subjects specified were a _Christ on the Cross_ and a _St. Francis Preaching_. The _Christ on the Cross_ is distinguished by a very fine religious spirit, enhanced by its admirable drawing and by a dignity quite its own. The fine and delicate modelling suggests comparison with the most perfect works of Italy; and the whole painting is overspread with an infinitely light surface coat of colour, very luminous and very pale.

This canvas is the best of all Goya’s religious works. On the contrary, his _St. Francis Preaching_ in no way deserved the vogue which it enjoyed at the time, both at Court and in the city circles. Its heavy composition, pretentious and ill balanced, did no credit to any of Goya’s qualities, save that of colourist, in which respect he was always interesting.

Goya was now the idol of the whole population of Madrid, who revelled in his fantasies and regarded him as their national painter. Already celebrated through his scenes of the life of the people, he had now acquired a new prestige through the fame of his religious paintings; and there was good reason for astonishment that he had not yet been rewarded by any official honour. His rival painters had scant love for him, or, to put it more frankly, they hated the powerful originality of his talent so far removed from the slow product of their uninspired toil. In order to belittle him, they censured the incorrectness of his drawing and the violent character of his subjects. But public opinion triumphed over this dead weight of malevolence. However reluctantly, the Academy of Saint-Marc welcomed him among its members on the seventh of May, 1780, hailing him as “academician by merit.”

A few months later the Chapter of Nuestra Señora del Pilar at Saragossa decided to have its sanctuary decorated and instituted a competition among the leading artists of Spain, under the direction of Goya’s brother-in-law, Francisco Bayeu. Goya decided to compete, and one of the vaults, with its adjacent panels, was assigned to him. The sketches which he submitted were only half satisfactory, and the Chapter requested him to modify them. Goya took the criticisms in ill part, imputing them, whether rightly or wrongly, to his brother-in-law’s jealousy, and refused in any way to modify his designs. A bitter quarrel might have resulted, if mutual friends had not intervened to reconcile the two artists. Finally, Goya agreed to make certain concessions; the vault was entrusted to him, and he forthwith commenced the execution of his frescoes.

The subject chosen represented _The Virgin and the Martyred Saints in their Glory_. This immense work required no less than three years of the artist’s time, and he expended upon it all his science and all his exceptional qualities as a colourist. It is an attractive work, cleverly composed, possessing a fine decorative effect, brilliant and warm, and in no way inferior to the most resplendent frescoes of Tiepolo. Only one thing was lacking, the religious spirit, of which Goya was wholly destitute. In works of this order, dexterity is not sufficient; the breath of the inner zeal is necessary; cleverness, dexterity, the gift of colour, cannot make up for the absence of faith. As often as Goya attempted religious painting, the result showed the same general order of deficiencies, because he always treated his subjects solely as a painter, and not, after the manner of Raphael and Correggio, as a devout believer.

Furthermore, the ideal was not in his line; the dominant note of his talent, before all else, was naturalism. Genre painter by temperament, he sought by preference for the picturesque aspect of his subjects. Owing to these conditions, his frescoes at Saragossa and in general all his large religious compositions are in reality nothing else than vast genre paintings.

THE GLORIOUS PERIOD

At the same time that he was painting his frescoes and his scenes of popular life, Goya also tried his skill at portraiture. In this branch of his art his success was immediate and complete. From his very first attempts he attained the highest possible reputation. From morning till night he saw his studio besieged by all the most distinguished figures in the society of the Court and the city. It soon became the fashion, the rage, to have oneself painted by Goya. They stood in line at his door; they brought all sorts of influence to bear to obtain the favour of a sitting. All the celebrities of the period, poets, scientists, political luminaries, equally with ladies of rank and reigning beauties, succumbed to this unheard-of vogue, which persisted, we may add, to the very end of the master’s long career. Furthermore, his portraits form the most extensive part of his life-work, and at the same time the part which is the most indisputable and the most perfect.

There are nearly two hundred portraits that are known to have been painted by Goya. They are not all of equal value, and in some of them we feel a certain degree of carelessness of execution, which is to be explained by the rapid workmanship demanded of him by the abundance of his orders. But however hasty the work may be, there are always to be found in it the essential qualities of this artist: a surety of expression, a free yet firm outline, and an incredible understanding of his model’s personality. Goya did not trouble himself to embellish his patrons, for he was no flatterer; if the man or woman who posed before him was homely, Goya’s pencil would do nothing towards correcting the injustices of nature. That was not his business; but he was able, with an unsurpassed clearness of vision, to catch upon his canvas that flashing glance, that fugitive gleam of the inner soul which, at some precise moment, is sure to transfigure the most unlovely features. What distinguished him above all else was his originality, that purely personal stamp, thanks to which it is impossible not to recognize a Goya from the first instant. There is in him something that he shares in common with all the great portraitists, and yet he resembles no one of them. He is Goya.

In the portraits painted in costume, now to be seen in the museum at Madrid, he somewhat approached the manner of Velazquez; under this class might be mentioned the portraits of the Infante Don Luis and his family, that of the Count of Florida-Blanca, of the Duchess of Alba, and of General Urrutia, which is a magnificent masterpiece. All these portraits possess distinction, bold relief, and a lofty carriage which recalls the free and noble manner of the painter of Philip IV.

At other times his brush took on a milder manner, shading off into soft and vaporous tints that set us thinking of Reynolds and of Prudhon, especially in those intimate portraits into which he has put the greatest spontaneity. In this class belong the admirable _Young Man in Gray_, the painter’s grandson--this portrait is certainly one of the most beautiful of all Goya’s works--and the famous portraits of Moratin, Boyeu, Josefa Bayeu, the architect Villanueva, and the two _Majas_, both the nude and the clothed, which are said to be portraits of the Duchess of Alba, taken in the same pose but under two different aspects. We may also include among the works of his second manner the two portraits of woman which hang in the Louvre; _The Woman with the Fan_, which is reproduced in the present volume, and the _Portrait of a Young Woman_, which, together with the _Ferdinand Guillemardet_, are the only paintings by Goya which France’s chief national museum possesses.

All these portraits are admirably conceived, in a simple, natural form, without superfluous details, and they are freely painted, in a rich and solid colouring, and stand out from the canvas, substantial, harmonious, pulsing with life, against those vaporous and imponderable backgrounds of which, since Velazquez, Goya alone has found the secret.

At this epoch Goya was not only a celebrated painter, he was also a man of fashion, mingling with persons of the highest rank. The Infante Don Luis kept him throughout entire seasons at his palace of Arenas de San Pedro, in the province of Avila, and it was there that Goya executed an entire series of magnificent portraits and genre paintings which belong to-day to the Counts of Chinchón. “Then there are the Benaventes, Dukes of Ossuna and of Candia, who for a period of more than ten years ordered work after work from him, at one time religious compositions, destined for the cathedral at Valencia, such as _St. Francis of Barja bidding Farewell to his Family_ and _St. Francis exhorting an Impenitent Dying Man_, celebrated pictures which have been reproduced by the engraver Peleguer,--at other times portraits of the family, and lastly, a series of twenty-seven genre pictures for their _Alameda_ in the environs of Madrid.”

Idyllic and anecdotic scenes play by far the larger part in these compositions. There is an _Al Fresco Breakfast_, in the midst of a delightful landscape, a _Dance beside the Water_, a _Hunter showing his Family the Game that he has Killed_, a _Harvesting the Hay_, a _Resting from Labour_, a _Greased Pole_, a _Comical Accident at a Picnic_, a _Winter Landscape_, _The Seasons_, _Workmen constructing a Building_, _Highwaymen attacking a Stage-coach_, _Gypsies playing at See-saw_, _Bulls in the Arroyo_, and lastly some of those inexplicable “caprices,” bizarre fantasies in which Goya mingles sorcerers and horned demons with members of the Inquisition.

Goya frequently introduced Inquisitors into his scenes; he had felt their claws early in life and had borne them a grudge ever since.

The most important and most celebrated canvas in this collection is _The Romeria of San Isidro_. This is the great festival in honour of the patron saint of Madrid. “The whole populace has come to make merry on the banks of the Manzanares, and the vast meadow which stretches from the hill-top where the saint’s hermitage stands, down to the very water’s edge, is covered by an immense throng, motley and variegated, pressing and crowding around the tents of the acrobats, the vendors’ booths, the open-air kitchens, and wine-shops. All this picturesque world is divided into a thousand varied groups; here a circle has been formed around a man strumming on a guitar; over yonder a merry set is forming; there is quarrelling, dancing, drinking; there are meetings and partings, and in the midst of all this swarming multitude we watch the coming and going of pages, troopers, porters, members of the body-guard in their red coats, amidst an indescribable pell-mell of carriages with gaily decked steeds, and of _calesinos_ with bodies painted in atrocious colours, which are overturned by the restive mules as they break away. In the foreground, dominating the whole scene, pretty women shading themselves under pink silk parasols, and well garbed personages grouped in easy and unaffected attitudes, form a most ingenious and charming framework for the scenes which are being enacted at their feet. In the background of the picture, above and beyond the Manzanares, we see the palace with its terraced gardens and the city with its towers and domes. Here are San Francisco el Grande and the Cuesta de la Vega, and yonder is the famous Barrio de Lavapiés.”

Treated in a warm and luminous scale of colour, lustrous with subtle and vivid tones, this sparkling page remains unsurpassed, because of the infinite care which Goya expended in order to give variety and an astonishing degree of precision to even the minutest of its multifold details.

The pictures of country life, such as the _Al Fresco Breakfast_, _The See-saw_, _The Dance_, _The Picnic_, show us Goya under still another aspect. The first time that one sees these pictures in the _Alameda_ one would say that they were the product of the brush of some one of the French painters of the eighteenth century; one is tempted to attribute them to Watteau or Fragonard; and it is true that Goya chose, like them, to reproduce the fashions and frivolities of his time; but even while he imitated the vanities and affectations of these masters, he remained nevertheless a Spaniard, and his types and his costumes are represented with the most scrupulous truth.

On the 25th of April, 1789, a few months after Charles IV. ascended the throne, a royal order raised Goya to the dignity of _Pintor da Camara_, which corresponded to _Peintre Ordinaire du Roi_, a title formerly bestowed upon French artists. This distinction gave him, as in the case of Gentlemen of the Bed-chamber, free entry to the palace. Under the new king the Court had taken on a new aspect. During the reign of the devout Charles III. it was constrained to all the outward show of austere piety which recalled the morose years under the monarchs of the House of Austria. Under the new king everything was changed, laughter was revived, festivals recommenced, and with them, intrigues of gallantry and licentiousness. Scandals multiplied, and the example came from high up; Queen Maria-Luisa herself set the pace for a society that had been parched with thirst for pleasure, and she flaunted before the whole nation her absolute contempt of decency and her unbridled appetite for dissipation. The epoch of the high favour of the Prince de la Paix began. Goya, whose marriage had but poorly reformed him, welcomed this change of regime with enthusiasm. He was already something more than celebrated in Madrid because of his prowess with the fair sex, famous for his duels, an adept at all the nicer usages through his constant association with the upper circles; consequently he felt himself fully at ease in this atmosphere of shamelessness and incontinence. He had some famous intrigues and illustrious _liaisons_, which he did not even take the trouble to conceal. Possessed of a caustic and subtle wit, and untroubled by scruples, he was much sought after for the brilliance and the daring of his conversation. Those who did not like him learned to fear him. Before long he had scored an even bigger success as a man than as an artist. Through contact with men of rank, he had acquired not only assurance but a certain air of haughtiness verging upon insolence. Being drawn into the circles of the Duchess of Alba and Duchess of Ossuna, who at that time, like rival queens, were disputing the sceptre of fashion and pleasure, he witnessed and shared in many a boudoir intrigue, taking sides in these women’s quarrels, at one time supporting the one side, then again going over to the other, and at last coming out openly in favour of the Duchess of Alba, who at that time was waging a silent warfare with Maria-Luisa. Having become the _cavaliere servente_ of the Duchess, he no longer contented himself with plotting intrigues or launching epigrams; but he translated his opinions into the form of satiric caricatures, in which he mercilessly ridiculed the adversaries of his fair lady. The arrows that he launched flew so high that the outraged queen exiled the Duchess from her court and gave the _Pintor da Camara_ a leave of absence. Goya and the Duchess set forth side by side on the road to Andalusia, sharing the period of their disfavour on a distant estate belonging to the Duchess of Alba.