Works by Francisco Goya
603 works · 199 ms
In 1799 Francisco Goya published the Caprichos, eighty etchings toned with aquatint and crowded with human folly, nightmares and monsters.
Goya came to wider notice through designs for the Royal Tapestry Factory, a commission he owed partly to his wife's brother Francisco Bayeu, head of the tapestry works from 1777. Boy on a Ram is one of the full-size cartoons that weavers copied, painted for a small panel over a door in a dining room at the El Pardo palace near Madrid. A child in a wide straw hat lifts a switch as he rides a dark ram with a bell at its neck. In time the cartoons felt confining to him: a loom could not follow the shifts of colour and the thick and glazed paint he was now using on canvas.
From 1786 he drew a salary as painter to Charles III, and under Charles IV he painted the king, the queen and the prime minister, Godoy. These portraits seldom flatter. In Charles IV of Spain and His Family, of 1800–01, the queen stands at the centre, where Goya placed her because she was thought to hold the real power, while the painter himself looks out from the shadows at the back left, beside a tall canvas. Silk, sashes and the stars of royal orders glint along the row of figures.
An illness never diagnosed had left him deaf in late 1792 or early 1793, and his work turned darker. He made the Caprichos alongside his official portraits and church paintings. In plate 48, a bat-winged creature swoops over a huddled man while smaller beasts press in behind him, all against a flat brown sky of aquatint. Reported to the Inquisition, Goya took the set off the market. The Seated Giant, made by 1818 in burnished aquatint, sits naked beyond a low ridge under a thin crescent moon and turns to look back over his shoulder. In Self-Portrait with Dr. Arrieta, his last self-portrait, the sick painter of 1819 slumps against his doctor, who holds out a glass to him, and the writing along the bottom thanks Arrieta for his life, as on a votive picture. Prints outnumber paintings below, and most date from the 1790s and the 1810s.
Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Art Institute of Chicago, Museo del Prado, Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
