Part 6

It would have been strange indeed if Goya had resisted the temptations by which he was surrounded; it is remarkable under the circumstances that he remained unspoiled. The King, as we have seen, was his friend, the Queen confided to him her most delicate secrets, the all-powerful Prince de la Pax made him welcome at Aranjuez, and the most distinguished women of the day delighted in entertaining him. Writing to his friend Zapater about his success at this period, he said: ‘I had established for myself an enviable mode of life; I no longer danced attendance in an ante-chamber; if anybody wanted anything of mine he had to come to me. I was much sought after, but if it was not anybody in a high position, or to oblige a friend, I worked for none.’ He was a privileged guest at the palaces of the Marchioness of Santa Cruz and of San Carlos; Brunetti and the Countess of Benavente fêted him. His relations with the beautiful and vivacious Duchess of Alba are too well known to call for more than a passing mention. The artist painted at least a dozen portraits of the Duchess, in one of which he presents himself in company with his inamorata. He introduced her piquant features into the frescoes of San Antonio de la Florida. She is the model for the nude and clothed Maja which hang in the Prado Museum. Tradition has it that the clothed Maja was painted to meet the wishes of the Duke, who expressed a desire to inspect the master’s work. The story is almost comical to any one who has stood in front of the two pictures. Nothing but the most conventional views upon the subject of the nude could make the naked study more offensive in the eyes of a husband than the one in which the young woman, ‘naked in spite of her dress,’ appears to challenge the continence of all the St. Anthonys of Christendom.

Of these pictures Mr. Charles Ricketts writes in an illuminating chapter on _The Masterpieces of the Prado_: ‘Goya’s two pictures are still vivacious and fresh. In “La Maja,” a nude, he has painted the sensuous waist, the frail arms, the dainty head of the Duchess thrown upon pillows, contrasting in their gray whiteness with the gleam upon her flesh. In the other we note the same grace of pose, a more summary workmanship, touches of colour--too many perhaps. The Duchess of Alba (La Maja) reclines on her divan in her rich bolero and white duck trousers of a toreador or Spanish dandy. We pause, we are astonished and charmed; we wonder how such a thing was possible. Her beauty and daring live on the two canvases; this one scandal in the nineteenth century has endowed the world with those pictures, and they are now in the Prado. So ends the adventure.’

The scandal which associated Goya’s name with that of the Duchess of Alba, fanned, it may be suspected, by the jealousy of the Countess of Benavente, could not be concealed, and by the order of Maria Luisa, the Duchess was banished in 1795 to the seclusion of her estate at San Lucar. The painter immediately obtained from the King a prolonged leave of absence and accompanied her into exile. On the journey to San Lucar an accident happened to their carriage, and Goya with his characteristic energy set to work to repair the defect. An iron bar belonging to the coach was buckled; a fire had to be lighted and the iron made straight. The heat and the unwonted exertion which the operation entailed was followed by a chill, and from this chill resulted the deafness which, in later years, became complete. The Duchess was recalled in the following year--this exercise of royal clemency being apparently the only means of securing the return of the painter to Madrid--and died in the same year in the fullness of her exquisite and inspiring beauty.

The period of Goya’s greatest popularity (1780-1800) was the period of his greatest activity. He was high in the favour of the Court. Much of his time was absorbed in painting portraits of his royal and aristocratic patrons. At the same time he never lost touch with the commonalty, nor his powers to depict, with sympathy and understanding, the life of the country--the bustling, laughing, loving, wrangling, vibrating life he loved and to which, by birth and temperament, he belonged. It is probable that he was never a courtier at heart. His effrontery and uncompromising independence, combined with incisive wit and physical strength, made him at once a singular and incongruous but popular figure in the Court circles, while his frank _camaraderie_ and his amazing prowess in the national games and feats of strength, and above all, the boldness and skill of his demeanour in the bull-ring--in which he is said to have been the equal of the professional espada--won for him the enthusiastic admiration of the hero-worshipping people of Madrid. He seems to have been at no pains to disguise the real bent of his nature. The story runs that he would frequently leave the royal palace to pass the night in the most disreputable taverns and bodegas in the suburbs of Madrid, drinking, dicing, and merrymaking with the night-birds of the capital.

But Goya’s artistic output showed no signs of falling off either in quality or amount, and his marvellous rapidity of workmanship enabled him to produce an almost incredible number of canvases. In a biography and review of this size and scope it is not possible to present a leisured review of his pictures. We must be content with a brief notice of the more important among them, but the illustrations at the end of the volume which are produced in such wealth, and which constitute the chief interest of this book, will speak more eloquently than words. Of Goya’s methods of painting many stories are told, from which it might be concluded that he employed for the purpose every instrument known to art with the solitary exception of a brush. Gautier, who declared his mode to be as eccentric as his talent, has exhausted all the facts and legends relating to his brush-work (if so it can be called) in the following vivacious descriptive passage: ‘He kept his colours in tubs, and applied them to the canvas by means of sponges, brooms, rags, and everything that happened to be within his reach. He put on his tones with a trowel, as it were, exactly like so much mortar, and painted touches of sentiment with large daubs of his thumb. From the fact of his working in this offhand and expeditious manner, he would cover some thirty feet of wall in a couple of days. This method certainly appears somewhat to exceed even the licence accorded to the most impetuous and fiery genius; the most dashing painters are but children compared to him. He executed, with a spoon for a brush, a painting of the “Dos de Mayo,” where some French troops are shooting a number of Spaniards. It is a work of incredible vigour and fire.’

The vigour and fire which Gautier finds in this picture is to be observed in varying degree in all Goya’s works. These qualities were the results of his temperament, which moved him to fling his ideas upon the canvas before they could escape him, and imbued him with a constant desire to be rid of them and at work on something else. ‘His whole art,’ says Muther, ‘seems like a bull-fight; for everywhere he sees before him some red rag, and hurls himself upon it with the fury of the toro.’ Nor did his sitters escape the consequences of his impetuosity. Many of his portraits were painted in a day, but the sitting lasted not a few hours merely but the whole of the day, during which time, Mr. Rothenstein tells us, ‘Goya, inexorable towards his model, worked in absolute silence with extraordinary concentration and vigour.’ The same writer relates, as an example of his nervousness and irritability in his studio, the story that the Duke of Wellington so exasperated Goya while he was painting his portrait by passing comments upon his work while the picture was in progress, that he took a sword from the wall and forced his noble sitter to beat a retreat from his studio. Other authorities state that it was with a pair of pistols that he put the English Duke to flight. After all, the weapon is not a material point in the story.

A man who worked at this pressure might be expected to develop a tendency to scamp his work, but while many of Goya’s compositions are mere sketches, they are all finished according to his theory that ‘a picture is finished when its effect is true.’ The many compositions Goya executed for the Countess of Benavente, until recently at the Alameda Palace, comprised the most representative exhibition of Goya’s genius. The collection included many pictures painted with exceptional delicacy. The most important of these pictures, the Romeria de San Isidro, is a wonderful canvas containing a mass of details which astonish by their clearness and finish. The ‘Coach attacked by Brigands’ is one example among many of his skill in catching an instantaneous motion and transfixing it upon the canvas. Among the Alameda paintings are some repetitions of the designs for the tapestry factory. The exuberant gaiety in these pictures is in amazing contrast with the ‘San Bernard’ or the terrifying cartoon of ‘Saturn devouring his Children.’ Goya can be simple and bizarre, idyllic and grotesque, fascinating and appalling--his vitality emphasises every facet of his imagination. The examples of phases of his many-sided vision are inexhaustible. He makes demons terrible by their humanity, and men and women horrible by their diabolical sinisterism. He paints you a fête or a funeral, a picnic or a hanging, with the same facility and artistic assurance; be the mood he would portray gay or gloomy, the scene brilliant or shuddersome, the beauty that of a child, a blushing maiden or a dazzling Maja, he never hesitates, nor does he often come short of success.

In his portraits he is a realist--versatile, vivid, often unflinching in his brutality, unsurpassed, when he wills it, in perfection of treatment and intention. His finish is the fulfilment of his purpose, which has nothing in common with finish in the sense of elaboration. True, many of his likenesses are ‘washed in with a certain impatience, almost as if the painter had tired of his subject’ (C. Gasquoine Hartley, in _A Record of Spanish Painting_); true again, the restlessness of his temperament made him inclined to seize on a characteristic rendering of pose and feature: but his portraits reflect the idea in his mind; they express the always very definite something he has to say; the effect is true and the picture is finished. It was his method to arrange his canvas, his model and all his accessories, and then remain wrapped in profound reflection. When his study of his model was ended he set to work, either to materialise his inspiration in a swift realisation of a personality, or to produce a suave, lingering piece of workmanship which recalls the refinement of Gainsborough in its elaborate, exquisite detail.

Goya, by virtue of his portraits, has been rightly acclaimed the legitimate descendant of Velazquez, and, like the great Court painter of a previous century, he is a magnificent exception. But the comparison between the two masters cannot be pushed too far. Velazquez was a realist to whom the world appeared as a beautiful vision; Goya was a realist to whom life was always a drama and not infrequently a satiric melodrama played in the tempo of a farce. Velazquez depicted men and women at their noblest; Goya, when he was in the mood, detected the worst that was in them and he exposed it with a flourish. The grandeur of the times which we discern in the portraits of Velazquez is the grandeur of the artist’s conception and treatment. The equestrian effigies of Philip III. and Philip IV. reveal the magnificence and nobility of conscious kingship which neither of the monarchs possessed; the royal likenesses convey to us a prosperity which impoverished Spain did not enjoy under the rule of his kingly sitters. Thus it is curious to find that some critics, but particularly the Conde de la Viñaza, should see in Goya’s work a similar determination to idealise and glorify the characters of his royal patrons. ‘The celebrated canvas of the family of Charles IV.,’ writes Goya’s latest Spanish biographer, ‘together with the equestrian portraits’--the composition of which, as Mr. Rothenstein reminds us, he may well have learned from Velazquez--‘of Maria Luisa and her husband, of Ferdinand VII. and Godoy, show forth a grandeur of mind and intellectual and moral qualities which these people did not possess. The Godoy represented by Goya as though he were a sort of Marquis de Pescara, although he never wore his uniform except at sham fights, recalls the fact that Velazquez also, flattering the ridiculous vanity of the Count-Duke of Olivarez, painted his portrait in a suit which was not his own.... Goya painted moral life hyperbolically idealised in his effigies of the kings, because he was painter to the Household and protected by the Crown and the Court, although he was rather the protector of his protectors. In all the other portraits of statesmen, politicians, literati, scientific men, actors, bull-fighters, priests and artists, Goya harmonised exactly the body and the mind. How marvellously he caught the faces of the men of great minds! How beautifully the moral and intellectual qualities of the person represented are shown!’

A second and more cautious reading of the foregoing passage was required to convince us that it was written without sarcasm, and was meant to express a sober estimate of the qualities which the writer discovered in the pictures referred to. Personal taste, as we have remarked elsewhere, counts for much in the whole field of art, and in the opinion which is quoted the Conde de la Viñaza has the field practically to himself. Nearly all Goya’s critics and admirers are united in their appreciation of the merciless and remorseless frankness, the pitiless satire, the mocking, saturnine faithfulness of the likenesses. Sir William Stirling-Maxwell misses the point of the equestrian portrait of Charles IV. when he remarks that ‘the poor imbecile king, in the blue uniform and cocked hat of a colonel of the guards, mounted on a sober brown charger,’ is ‘an example of the dignity which may be conferred, by a skilful hand, on the most ordinary features and expression, without sacrificing the resemblance.’ But who beside Viñaza and Stirling-Maxwell could detect anything but a burlesque of kingly dignity in this grandly-uniformed, coarsely-made and coarse-faced Bourbon who sits ‘asthmatic and fat, upon his fat asthmatic horse, with his fat asthmatic dog’--a study which moves a German critic to remark, ‘How like a Moloch he appears, an evil god who has battened upon the life-blood of his people.’

The portraits of his sensuous, passion-ridden queen are equally fearless, true even to brutality. Maria Luisa was a courtesan seated upon the throne of Spain. Velazquez, it has been wisely said, redeemed the face of Mariana of Austria in his portrait by making her unapproachable icy pride the keynote in his composition. Goya extenuates nothing. He shows the queen, _décolletée_ to vulgarity in her insolently vulgar gown, with gleaming arms and bosom exposed as a snare, which is watched over by the greedy, hawk-like eyes. It is the woman she was, the ‘woman who loved men better perhaps than she was loved by them,’ the courtesan that the artist knew and flattered and despised. Of the picture of the ‘Family of Charles IV.,’ with its fourteen life-size figures, it has been written that it ‘mirrors the hidden merriment with which Goya recorded the Court history.’ Here is a faithful exposition of Goya’s estimate of the Spanish royal family; an estimate which has never been so remorselessly expressed by any other delineator of royal groups. They are depicted in their resplendent uniforms and rich gowns, they have all the dignity that is derived from gorgeous trappings, but Goya has not spared them, or us, a tittle of their pitiful stupidity, their coarse insolence, their mental and moral degeneracy. ‘The heads are admirably painted, as Gautier admitted, ‘and are full of life, delicacy and intelligence’; but the French critic’s general verdict upon the group represented is his best tribute to the genius of the painter;--‘a grocer’s family who have won the big lottery prize.’

The more closely one studies these royal portraits the more one becomes convinced of their truth. To-day they remain as real to us as the sympathetic, Velazquezesque likenesses of the painter Bayeu in the Prado, or of Dr. Peral in the National Gallery. It is almost impossible for any one to be in a position to award the palm for supreme excellence among Goya’s portraits, for besides being so numerous, they are widely distributed among the aristocratic families of Spain, and many are practically inaccessible to the student. There are fewer than two dozen of his portraits in the Prado, only two in the National Gallery, and one in the Louvre. Few people are familiar with more than a certain number of his portraits. For this reason there are many different opinions as to the comparative merit of his pictures, but the individual opinions all constitute a remarkable tribute to the painter’s genius in catching the likeness and reflecting the character of his subjects.

Of the portrait of Villanueva, Señor Caveda writes that ‘it not only faithfully represents the features of the famous architect and the expression of him as a whole, but reveals in him the goodness of soul that animates him, and the noble simplicity of character which is so skilfully transmitted in all Goya’s impressions.’ Señor Mariano Nonqués, referring to the portrait of Moratin, now in the possession of Don F. Silvela, declares that ‘it may rightly be said without any appearance of exaggeration that this effigy is painted with the mind and with a spontaneity which is clearly seen, since there is nothing in it that reveals difficulty in the work, or any preconceived idea of imitating any other painter in its execution,’ and he adds that, by reason of the individuality it discloses, it should be considered one of the best likenesses painted by Goya. According to the painter Carlos Luis de Ribera, the genius of ‘La Tirana’ may be seen in the head of the portrait of the distinguished actress, Rosario Fernandez. ‘In it, as in all his (Goya’s) works,’ says this authority, ‘there is that air of truth which so few painters have attained; there is brilliancy and freshness without pretension or exaggeration, the model is simple and convenient, and while it makes no show of strength it is not weak. Its execution springs as much from sentiment as that of all his canvases, because it was never sought after by Goya, but was the consequence and result of his spontaneity and intuition.’ Again, of his portrait of José Luis Munarriz, the eminent critic, Don Francisco Maria Tubina, writes: ‘There is something on the canvas in addition to perfection in the technique, the beautiful development of the subject and the exact likeness; the immaterial part must be recognised and appreciated--the inner vigour Goya gives the character, which illumines the features with the glow of the soul. Munarriz is represented to us in the picture as the fancy imagines him, as we see him in his biography, ingenious and lively in thought, distinguished in form, kind and firm in temperament, prudent in judgment, and with a mind always directed upon things which elevate and ennoble. Munarriz the literary man,’ he says in conclusion, ‘is the Munarriz of the picture, the one being explained by the other.’ And read, also, what the _Boletin de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones_ contains concerning the two portraits of Doña Antonia de Zárate, now in the possession of Señora Vinda de Albacete: ‘But where Goya shows the most exquisite sensibility and profound psychology is in these two portraits of one person, in which he incorporates the whole story of a dreamer swayed in life and death by the highest ideals, a woman of a race of poets and artists, Antonia de Zárate. Though in the first portrait he represented her smiling and in perfect health, in the second he knew her existence was undermined by a treacherous disease which was to cause her death. Never have we felt more deeply the impression of pathos than before this presentment of a soul rather than a person, before this face enveloped in transparent veils, with life showing in the eyes, and in that life a melancholy realisation of approaching death.’

Goya’s portraits, as we have said, are so numerous that it is only possible to deal here with a brief selection of them. In his large and varied gallery he displays so much versatility that it appears impossible that they could all have been conceived by the same mind and painted by the same hand. His treatment is alternately rough to the verge of violence and as smooth as the work of a miniaturist; his tones are crude and heavy or luminous and glowing, as the sitter appeals to his mind; he makes his queen a confessed harlot and his little grandson the incarnation of dainty boyhood. The portrait of his wife, now in the Prado, is a work of the highest excellence, so are the beautiful representations of the Duchess of Alba, the vivid impression of Asensi, the delicious portrait of the Marquesa de Pontejos, the Gainsboroughesque study of the Conde de Florida Blanca, the equestrian painting of General Palafox, the dashing, almost contemptuously vivid likeness of Godoy, the striking portrait of Guillemardet so enthusiastically eulogised by M. León Legrange (_Gazette des Beaux-Arts_), and those of the Duke of Osuna, of Felix Colón, Jove-Llanos and Ventura Rodriguez, of Martincho and Romero, the bull-fighters, of Pignatelly, General Urrutia, of the royal children, and of himself, painted when still young--each portrait bears the stamp of Goya’s genius, each expresses an individuality in his individual style, each is finished because its effect is true.

Goya’s portrait of the Duke of San Carlos, the most loyal friend of the son of Maria Luisa, has won the admiration of many painters and critics. The head is beautifully painted, the posing is natural and graceful, the figure lives and breathes. For this ‘miracle of art,’ as Viñaza styles it, Goya used only a few colours, which he spread over the canvas with an energetic and grandiose brush, each stroke being the expression of an æsthetic thought and the perfection of the technique of painting. The portrait, ‘which legitimises Goya’s descent from Velazquez,’ is said to be like the work of Rembrandt in its clare-obscure, of Watteau in its correctness, and of Titian in its delicacy and freshness. But there is no end to the expressions of admiration which Goya has inspired. Eduardo Rosales went to Zaragoza annually to visit Goya’s portrait of the Duke of San Carlos, and on one occasion, when he had been lifted by a friend that he might study the face of the portrait, he is reported to have exclaimed, ‘My friend, such painting will never be seen again.’

In 1798 Goya was intrusted with the decoration of the newly built church of San Antonio de la Florida, which had sprung into existence in 1720 as a primitive hermitage, had been destroyed when the El Pardo road was made in 1768, was re-erected two years later, and in 1792 was replaced by the present elegant edifice, which was built at the expense of the royal patrimony, after the plans of the celebrated architect, Ventura Rodriguez. The outside of the building is of good architectural style, the interior is small and elegant, and well suited to the rank and fashion which frequented it. The Church was opened for worship on July 1, 1799, and we read that ‘Madrid went wild with excitement at the glory of Goya’s achievement.’