I

A century before the birth of Goya, Spanish painting had attained its crown of achievement in the work of the four great naturalists, Velazquez, Ribera, Zurbarán, and Murillo. Josef de Ribera (‘Lo Spagnoletto’), had succeeded Ribalta, and had given lasting expression to the realism which characterised Spanish art in the seventeenth century; Francisco de Zurbarán, the Estremaduran peasant, whom Lord Leighton called ‘All Spain,’ carried on the tradition of the elder Herrera in his passion for truth in detail and in the dramatic intensity of his expression; Murillo, the disciple of the Spanish Catholic Church, bewitched his generation with what Antonio Castillo y Saavedra described as his ‘wondrous grace and beauty of colouring’; and Velazquez, ‘our Velazquez,’ as Palomino proudly styled him, was the supreme painter through whom Spanish art became the light of a new artistic life.

Of Velazquez it has been said that he attained perfection in the realism of detail and in the realism of sight, and in his commanding genius Spanish art was emancipated from the fetters of pseudo-Italianism in which it had laboured so long. He carried Spanish realism to its Ultima Thule. Further his age could not go, and generations of artists who came after him devoted themselves to the imitation and reproduction of his colour and his technique with such passionate servility that in the end the copy of the pupil was frequently mistaken for the work of the master. The perfect technique of the great Court painter had, in his own day, the effect of arresting artistic development—it left his successors nothing to solve for themselves. He achieved so much in his own work that, for a time, the last word in art seemed to have been spoken. Until his influence had died away, the reproduction of Velazquez was the aim of the Madrid painters. For this reason, after the death of Velazquez, the artistic life of the seventeenth century became a spent force, and for want of new impetus of original genius, Spanish art steadily declined. The followers of the supreme painter failed to realise the true inwardness of his message. They had the seed, but they could raise no new flower. One feels towards the pictures of Velazquez as Swinburne felt towards the muse of Sappho:

But the reverent desire to perpetuate ‘this best thing’ could not arrest the decay of artistic inspiration. The disciples of Velazquez copied and painted successfully (up to a point), and they trained other generations of imitators who continued to work and teach their methods, until imitation slowly but surely sank into artistic degradation. Under the sway of Mariana of Austria, the decay of Spanish painting was further hastened, and the ascendency of the facile, brilliant brush of Luca Giordano, under Charles II., dealt the death-blow to the realistic impulse that had carried the national school of the middle seventeenth century to the realisation of its utmost ambition.

The decadence which followed the death of Velazquez was most pronounced among the Castilian painters, but the empire of Giordano extended to the Provincial schools and completed the more gradual decline of art in Andalusia and Valencia. Seville was foredoomed to decadence as a school of painting, for its artists had taken Murillo as their model, and in servilely imitating the ‘Painter of the Conceptions,’ they emphasised his faults, exaggerated his unreality, and caricatured his affectations. The popular admiration of Murillo was all-powerful to hasten the general decline, and each year the artistic outgrowth of Andalusia became more enfeebled.

In the last months of the seventeenth century Charles II. died without issue and the art-loving Austrian dynasty was ended. The succeeding Bourbon sovereigns brought with them an art derived from France; they had no ambition to reanimate the native art of the country. Madrid became the only recognised art centre in Spain, and to Madrid, in 1761, came, at the invitation of Charles III., Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, the Venetian fresco-painter, and the Saxon pedant, Anton Raphael Mengs. The Spanish painters who had rendered homage to the facile Giordano were caught by the glamour of the fantastic, insincere art of Tiepolo, while the dreary academic influence of Mengs—whose paintings are declared by Carl Justi to echo the last shadow of eclectic mannerism—made for all that is dull, exact, and lifeless in pictorial art. No great Spaniard arose to counteract the demoralising influence of these imported professors; it was realised in the studios of Madrid that the methods of the favoured aliens led to popularity and fortune; the Spanish artists followed the line of least resistance, nor desisted when they found that it carried them ever further from the tradition founded by Velazquez.

This art, dull but without dignity, showy but meaningless, was the reflex of the prevailing rottenness in the national life. During the reign of Charles III. a certain superficial decency was observed; the corruptness of Court life was kept out of sight; a general conspiracy of make-believe was maintained. But under Maria Luisa of Parma and Charles IV., the abomination of moral desolation in social, political and artistic life was complete and confessed. Manuel Godoy, afterwards Prince de la Paz, was Prime Minister of Spain, and the country was demoralised by dissolute courtiers and unscrupulous ministers, and drained by insatiable priests. But in the turmoil created by an aristocracy sunk in lasciviousness, a government steeped in corruption, and a commonalty beaten and bled into a state of nerveless resignation, was heard the echo of the revolutionary movement which was sweeping over Europe. The teaching of Goethe and Schiller, followed by the preaching of Rousseau, had taken concrete form in the butcheries of Robespierre and Danton; the movement had culminated in the personal supremacy of Napoleon Buonaparte.

The hopes of the Spanish nation were centred in the Crown Prince Ferdinand. Even as the First of the Tigers thought to exterminate Fear by killing a man, the Spaniards believed that the abdication of Charles IV. would make an end of misrule and give their country peace and prosperity. But the King hated his son, and inspired by the double purpose of defeating the ambition of the Crown Prince and punishing the disloyalty of his subjects, he laid his crown at the feet of the Emperor of the French, who bestowed it upon his brother, Joseph Buonaparte. The Spanish liberals made the alien king welcome, but the Spanish loyalists proved a constant thorn in the side of the usurper, and at the end of five years Joseph Buonaparte fled Madrid. Two years later the Prince of the Asturias returned to Spain to be crowned king as Ferdinand VII. Again the distressful country was plunged into the depths of retrogression, clericalism, and fanaticism. Spain was undergoing her fate.

The strong men of the troublous times of the eighteenth century were the revolutionaries and reformers, and, as was inevitable, they sprang from the people. Rousseau, Robespierre, Napoleon, these were the forces that directed the movement, the effect of which was to make itself felt from one end of Europe to the other. Goya was a revolutionary. He lived under four kings of Spain. He was elected a member of the Académia de San Fernando in the reign of Charles III.; Charles IV. appointed him Pintor de Cámara del Rey; he took the oath of allegiance to Joseph Buonaparte and painted the usurper’s portrait; Ferdinand VII., who declared that he had deserved death for his defection from the Bourbon cause, condemned the man but pardoned the artist and received him as a member of the new Court. Critical opinion condones Goya’s flexible patriotism by the fact that ‘it was a period of national disaster,’ and that ‘national calamity was not altered by these trivialities.’

Goya, we are reminded, was a revolutionary; he was also a pitiless, if quizzical, onlooker at the life of the Madrid Court. It was a simple matter to him to transfer his allegiance from the Bourbons to Joseph Buonaparte, and it was even more simple to welcome Ferdinand VII. to the throne. ‘What did such changes matter in years of irretrievable ruin?’ writes C. Gasquoine Hartley, in A Record of Spanish Painting. The question may be left for the individual to answer according to his own fancy. And if Goya was, as some will find, an opportunist, a political weathercock, and a moral Vicar of Bray, as an artist he was a great reformative force. Alternately an idealist and a realist, he fought with all the social forces and against the academic standards of the school commanded by David and Mengs, destroying the debased conventions of painting and freeing the brush from the domination of a clique. A national artist par excellence, he gave lasting form to the sentiments, customs and conditions of his country. A profound believer in empiricism, a great humourist, sometimes impetuous and fantastic, at other times holding fast to reality; a master of portraiture; fantastic, inspired, spontaneous in his aquafortis etchings; he seized upon and immortalised every aspect of the gruesome tragi-comedy which was played in Spain in the last years of the eighteenth century.

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was born at the end of March (the 30th or 31st) 1746 at Fuentetodos near Zaragoza, in Aragon, the province which gave to the nation poets like the ‘Spanish Horaces,’ historians like Zurita, teachers like Gracián and Luzán, a scholar like Latassa, and a statesman like the Conde de Aranda. Goya was baptized in the Church of Our Lady of the Ascent, and the names given him by his godmother, Francesca de Grasa, were Francis Joseph. The amiable weakness for connecting great men with great families has prompted a German biographer to claim that both his father and mother belonged to the nobility, and that his first patron was the Duque de Fuentes. Less imaginative authorities, however, tell us that his parents, José Goya and Gracia Lucientes, were poor but hardworking peasants, and that when ‘the regenerator of the Spanish school of naturalistic painters’—to quote the prefatory note to Goya’s pictures in the Prado catalogue—had completed his course of elementary instruction at the hands of the village schoolmaster, he was put to agriculture. A fortunate accident revealed the bent of the lad’s genius and liberated him, at the age of fourteen, from the drudgery of manual labour.

M. Matheron relates that the lad had been sent with a sack of wheat to a neighbouring mill, when a monk of Zaragoza (probably Father Felix Salvador of the Carthusian convent of Aula Dei) happened upon him. Goya, seated on his burden, was intent upon drawing a pig with a piece of charcoal upon a whitewashed wall. The priest, struck by the correct free lines traced by the youngster, inquired who his master was and received the characteristic reply: ‘I have none, your reverence. It is not my fault, I cannot keep from drawing.’ The overmastering incentive pleaded by the youthful delinquent never forsook him, and, although powerful enemies resented his too free use of the pencil, and the Holy Inquisition was moved to curb his unwearied industry, he continued to ply brush and needle and gavel during sixty-eight years of changing, strenuous life. Father Salvador remained Goya’s friend until his death. He saw his father, and obtained permission from him, in 1760, for the lad to go to Zaragoza. The imperial city exercised a powerful influence upon his art. There is always in his pictures, as one of his countrymen points out, the Zaragoza landscape, so rich in the contrasts of its splendid and vigorous vegetation, recalling the banks of the Genil or the Turia, while its limy hills and grey plains bring to the memory the vistas of Castile. The melancholy of the sky—pierced by the severe lines of innumerable towers and bounded by the austere distant rock—remind us that here the sun has not the same suggested warmth that supplied the rays for Murillo’s brush; that this is not the land of fancy but the land of genius, cold as the snow of the Moncayo, that adds beauty to the beautiful plants which produce not sweet odours but healing balsams.

Thanks to the friendly offices of Father Salvador, Goya was admitted to the studio of José Luzán y Martinez, whose religious and historical pictures bear evidence of soft fresh colouring. He attended, too, the school founded in 1714 by the sculptor Juan Ramirez, a pupil of the well-intentioned Gregoria de Mesa. In the studio of Martinez, Goya, who from the first betrayed his lifelong passion for realism, worked with untiring ardour, stimulated, it may be, by the industry of his co-pupils, José Beratón, Tómas Vallespin, and the Huesca jeweller, Antonio Martinez, who founded, in Madrid, the silversmith’s business which still bears his name. ‘In the schools of Zaragoza,’ says C. Gasquoine Hartley, ‘he followed no conventional standards, and his continuous study was directed to the development of his exuberant individuality. To comprehend the truth, and afterwards to depict it, as it pleased his ever-varying fancy, this was his great aim. His utterance was inevitable and instinctive, the overflow of his dramatic, inexhaustible and vivid imagination.’

Goya’s exuberant, passionate temperament betrayed itself in other directions outside his art. He lived, as he worked, in a condition of unconventional, even arrogant independence. Many tales of the wild escapades of his youth are told. His revolutionary tendencies embroiled him in frequent altercations; thrice he is said to have fallen under the ban of the Inquisition. Zaragoza finally grew unsafe for him, and in 1766 he fled to Madrid. There are no discovered documents relating to his first years in Madrid, and his biographers, for the most part, preserve a discreet reticence concerning his mode of life in the capital. It is supposed that he copied Velazquez, and the pictures at the Casa de Campo, the seat of the Duque de Arcos. It has even been surmised that, through his friendship with Bayeu, he had the entrée to the royal palaces of La Zarzuela, Aranjuez, and the Escorial. Other writers favour the idea that he lived the life of a young revolutionary, and Richard Muther, in his monograph of the painter, pictures him ‘wild and passionate, an athlete in his physical strength,’ being ‘everywhere present when dancing or love-making, scuffling or stabbing, is going forward.’ The one outstanding fact, upon which most biographers are agreed, is that one morning he was found lying in the streets with a dagger in his back. This occurrence, supplemented, it is said, by his misfortune in again incurring the displeasure of the Inquisition—some hold that he was placed under police supervision—made him once more seek safety in flight. He had a will to visit Rome, but no money to defray his travelling expenses. Tradition declares that he joined himself to a company of bull-fighters, worked his way to the coast as a picador, and set sail for Italy.

Iriarte is the authority for most of the details concerning this period of Goya’s career. French writers declare that the painter remained in Italy from 1769 to 1774. There is a full-length likeness of Pope Benedict XIV. still in the Vatican which is said to have been painted by Goya in a few hours, but as that pontiff died in 1756 there is much reason to doubt the truth of the legend.

The Conde de la Viñaza in his Life of Goya refutes every detail of this story. It is said that while Goya was in Italy he secured a prize offered by the Parma Academy of Fine Arts for a picture of ‘Hannibal surveying Rome from a pinnacle of the Alps,’ but the Conde maintains that Goya at this time was in Spain and that it was in his own country he painted his picture and carried off the second prize. In the Mercure de France of January 1772 we read: ‘Le 27 Juin dernier l’Académie Royale des Beaux Arts de Parme tint sa séance publique pour la distribution de ses prix. Le sujet de peinture était: “Annibal vainqueur du haut des Alpes jette ses premiers regards sur les campagnes d’Italie.”... Le premier prix de peinture a été accordé au tableau qui avait devise: “Montes fregit aceto,” et qui était de monsieur Paul Borroni etc. Le second prix de peinture a été remporté par M. François Goya romain (sic), élève de M. Vajeu, peintre du roi d’Espagne.’

The following paragraph by M. Paul Mantz from the same source is quoted into the Archives de l’art français: ‘L’Académie a remarqué avec plaisir dans le second tableau un beau maniement de pinceau, de la chaleur d’expression dans le regard d’Annibal et un caractère de grandeur dans l’attitude de ce général. Si M. Goya se fût moins écarté dans sa composition du sujet du programme, et s’il eût mis plus de vérité dans son coloris, il aurait balancé les suffrages pour le premier prix.’

The Conde de la Viñaza, Goya’s Spanish biographer, maintains that this picture was painted and the prize won before the artist went to Italy, and he proves, by the publication of documents preserved in the Archives of the Pilar Cathedral at Zaragoza, that in October 1771 the painter, forsaking Madrid, was back on the banks of the Ebro in the enjoyment of an enviable reputation. This is in direct contradiction to the old stories describing a love adventure as the reason for his sudden and hasty departure from Rome. A mad enterprise which had for its object the rescue of a young maid from a convent ended, it is said, in his capture, and he ‘only escaped the gallows by the most reckless and headlong flight.’ This much we know, that Goya was in Zaragoza in 1771. He returned not as a fugitive and an outlaw, but as a reputable citizen having the confidence of the Cathedral authorities, who commissioned him to paint the quadrangular vault in the Holy Chapel. The fresco which he prepared as a proof that ‘he was experienced in this kind of painting,’ was submitted to the Building Committee of the Cathedral, on November 11, 1771, together with the director’s assurance that it had received the approval of experts, and with Goya’s offer to paint the vault of the small choir for 15,000 reals, he providing the labourers and materials. The Committee, having heard this proposition and recognising it as better than that made by Don Antonio Velazquez, who asked 25,000 reals for the work, ‘agreed to Goya’s proposition, but in order to be safe and sure,’ it was stipulated that he should make some further studies and submit them to Madrid for the approval of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (San Fernando), ‘which obtained, the negotiations would be completed and the contract signed.’

On January 27, 1772, Goya presented his study to the Committee, who having ‘already been informed that it was a skilful piece of work in specially good style,’ approved it, and waiving the stipulation that it should be submitted to the Royal Academy, they decided that the artist should forthwith proceed with the work. The documents give no information concerning the progress of the work, but we learn from a minute in the Building Committee’s meeting, held on June 1, 1772, that the painting of the choir was nearly finished by that date, and the scaffolding was about to be taken down.

We are without any authentic particulars concerning the next three years of Goya’s life, but the Conde de la Viñaza supposes that with the 15,000 reals which this work brought him, he went to Italy. How he passed his time there cannot be definitely stated, but many interesting surmises have obtained currency. We are assured by Mr. Muther that for Goya ‘the antique had no more existence than the magnificent art of the cinque-cento: what attracted him was rather the teeming life of the people. Out of the red robes of the priests, the costumes, gay with colour, of the women of Trastevere, the merry, careless freedom of the Lazzaroni, he created fragments of life, rich with all its varied colour. Muleteers with their jangling cars, religious processions and Carnivale masques,’ to say nothing of much ‘love-making, scuffling and stabbing’—these are imagined to be the influences that directed his genius during his stay in Italy. Paul Lafond (Goya), while admitting the legendary element in most of the reported incidents in the life of the painter, repeats the stories of his ascending to the lantern in the dome of St. Peter’s, of his making a tour of Cecilia Melella’s tomb, walking upright on the narrow ledge of the cornice, of his amatory escapade at a convent and its resultant flight from Rome. He also adds that his genre pictures attracted so much attention in Rome that the Russian ambassador, instructed by his sovereign to invite a number of distinguished artists to establish themselves at the Court at St. Petersburg, made Goya a very tempting offer, which he refused. On the other hand, the Conde de la Viñaza declares that ‘he was frequently seen studying the most sublime frescoes in the land, leaning boldly on the decorations of the architraves or on the most dangerous parts of the cornices’; that he secured the necessaries of life by the sale of pictures of the customs of his native land; that he made the acquaintance of Luis David, for whom he formed a deep and lasting attachment; and, finally, that ‘the only recollection he preserved of Italy in his old age was of his having met there the painter of “The Rape of the Sabines.”’

The friendship that existed between Goya and David has called attention to the similarities in the temperament and the aims of the two men, whose work was so widely different. Both used their brushes to glorify the throne and received honours from kings; both sacrificed tradition on the altar of new ideas; and both lacked the tenderness and the faith necessary in the treatment of religious subjects. David was the friend of Robespierre and Saint Just, of Marat and Buonaparte; he painted the ‘Coronation of the Hero of the Pyramids’; he attended the Convention and voted for the death of Louis XVI. Goya was the friend of Godoy and of the ministers of Joseph Buonaparte; he painted the pictures of the Usurper as well as those of the kings that preceded and followed him; and he executed ‘The Disasters of War’ and ‘The Caprices.’ David was ambitious for the aggrandisement of his art, and Goya strove to make it worthy of its civilising mission, but they differed in the means by which they sought to attain their respective ends. David was inspired by the antique, and produced works which possessed the hardness of statuary as well as its clear-cut accuracy of form, while Goya went direct to nature for his inspiration, and his paintings are the reflections of naked reality. The painter of ‘The Death of Socrates’ was imbued with the guiding purpose of making his work dignified, elaborately accurate, and exclusive, while the author of the frescoes of La Florida, drawing inspiration from the customs of the toilers and the dandies alike, held that ‘a picture is finished when its effect is true.’ David represented man endowed with improbable and unattractive virtues, Goya painted man as he was; David idealised the individual form with classic grandeur, and his austere and solemn compositions, though based on observation of nature, were moulded to a fixed external idea; but Goya was as faithful to psychologic truth as to anatomy, and his brush revealed the moral sentiments of mankind and laid bare the passionate and terrible emotions of the human soul.

When Goya returned to Madrid in 1775 Spanish art was directed by Mengs and Tiepolo, by Maëlla and Francesco Bayeu. Mengs, the ‘reasoning artificer,’ who had neglected the world of nature in his servile study of Raphael and the antique, was a painter who theorised much and invented little. According to Richard Cumberland he was an artist incapable of portraying either life or death; a painter whose creations neither terrify nor inspire passion or transport; a timid, conscientious craftsman with an excellent hand for miniature. Yet Mengs, the ‘Spanish David,’ as we are told by José de Madrazo, was regarded by the youth of his time as ‘the regenerator of the antique,’ and from the dictatorial chair of pictorial art, his voice ‘was heard like that of an oracle, not so much by the artistic cohorts of agitated Germany, where he received little attention, as by the peaceful Italo-Spanish pleiades, who applauded with enthusiasm the exhumation of the Hellenic form from among the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii, because it was the fashion, and without comprehending the reach of that fortuitous event.’

In the fantastic, beautiful, but slightly handled compositions of Battista Tiepolo we have the reaction against this form of classicism. The Venetian possessed a fertile and brilliant fancy, his execution was free and daring, if at times careless, and, in addition, he had a wide knowledge of the resources of his art. His decorations in the new palace at Madrid were ‘extolled to the skies of a generation that had forgotten Velazquez.’ Tiepolo got his effects rapidly; Mengs was laborious to a fault, but his work was probably a better guide for second-rate painters, themselves poorly equipped in knowledge, than the clearly (though incorrectly) drawn compositions of his Venetian contemporary. As director of the Académia de San Fernando, Mengs suggested several new laws for the government of the students and certain alterations in the methods of study. These were at first adopted, but in carrying them into effect the director seems to have met with opposition and involved himself in quarrels, which ‘did little credit to the wisdom of his fellow-directors, or to his own temper and tact.’ As a result of these dissensions Mengs failed to accomplish all his reforms, but he secured several important changes in the Academy. It was due to his efforts that plaster casts were taken of the statues discovered at Herculaneum. Charles III. dowered the institution with a rich collection of marbles and bronzes which had been presented to his Majesty by Mengs, and he supplemented this gift with a large number of statues and busts from the Museum of Cristina of Sweden, and with pictures from the royal galleries and from the suppressed houses of the Jesuits. The sovereign also formed a library for the Academy, opened a school of perspective (Royal Decree of August 19, 1766), and commissioned the surgeon Augustin Navarro to instruct the students in the science of nature and the human form.

In his efforts on behalf of the Academy, Mengs had the loyal assistance of Francisco Bayeu and Mariano Maëlla. The latter’s pictures are deficient in invention, in vigour of execution, and in variety; indeed his cold pearl-coloured creations have nothing to compensate their feeble and unimpressive handling and colour. Bayeu was gifted with peculiar intelligence and as an artist displayed fertility, capacity in composing a picture, and a skilful touch, but his designs lack vigour and delicacy, and his colour is disagreeable.

When Goya reappeared in Madrid in 1775, Mengs was dictator of art, and Bayeu was the Court painter. Goya’s art owed nothing to contemporary influence or example, but to these two officials he was indebted for employment and for his wife. The young Aragonese knew nothing of the bitterness of long apprenticeship; his rise in the esteem of the art world of Madrid was rapid. This, in a measure, was due to his genius, but his worldly prospects were assisted by his marriage to Josefa Bayeu, the sister of the Court painter, and by the influence of Mengs, which secured for him a commission to execute a series of designs for the tapestries woven at the Fábrica de Tapices de Santa Bárbara. This first series were designed for the decoration of the dining-room and bed-chamber of the Prince of the Asturias in the Palace of El Pardo. Goya delivered the first picture on October 31, 1776; on January 26, 1778, the tenth and last cartoon was delivered.

Between 1776 and 1791 Goya executed the forty-six tapestry cartoons which now hang in the Prado, and he repainted many of his designs on a smaller scale for the Countess of Benavente at the Alameda. As late as 1802 the Santa Bárbara factory wove tapestries from Goya’s pictures, and up to 1832 some of the more favoured designs had been reproduced four times. Isabella II. presented some of these fabrics to King Leopold of Belgium, but the greater number adorn the royal palaces of Madrid, El Pardo, and the Escorial.

The designs for tapestries which Goya composed during this period of over twenty-five years form a large part of the painter’s artistic output. It has been said that these early designs do not exhibit any of the painter’s predominant characteristics, and that they reveal crudeness and uncertainty. It is probable that Goya approached the task, in the first place, with very little knowledge of either the industry or the style of design required from him. Mr. Rothenstein remarks that the models in the Prado are painted ‘in so crude a key, and with so little regard for harmony of colouring, that their merit is apt to escape the attention of many students,’ while the strong reds and yellows Goya employs in them have prompted Mr. Muther to compare them unfavourably with the ‘tender delicate colouring’ of Watteau and Lancret. Certainly Goya’s designs are unequal in merit. It must be remembered, too, that often he had not the good fortune of being reproduced faithfully; while other artists employed by the factory gained much by reproduction, his work almost invariably suffered in the process. The officials at the factory objected to the elaborate and delicate work which Goya submitted, and a beautiful model (‘The Blind Man playing the Guitar’) was returned to him on the ground that it could not be successfully transferred to the threads of the warp. Goya corrected his design by exaggerating all the tints and he accentuated the figures by enclosing them in white outlines. This fact suggests one reason why Goya’s enthusiasm in the employment speedily grew cool.

We learn from the Palace archives that the officials, who were more concerned with the commercial than the artistic side of the manufacture, declared that Goya’s figures were ‘dandies and girls with so much decoration of coifs, ribbons, fal-lals, gauzes, etc., that much time and patience is wasted on them, and the work is unproductive.’ They contrived to remedy this defect by covering his figures with paintings of trees or clouds or anything else that made the tapestry easier and cheaper to produce, and this treatment was not calculated to make Goya more careful in the finish of his designs. It therefore follows of necessity that only occasionally among his later cartoons can one be found to compare with those in the first series, such, for instance, as ‘The Picnic on the Banks of the Manzanares’ and ‘The Dance at San Antonio de la Florida,’ or indeed with any of the earlier designs, which were all remarkable for the vigour and animation of the scenes, the delicacy of colouring (despite an occasional surfeit of sienna and red ochre), the strength and freedom of the drawing, and the genius for natural and effective grouping in the composition of the pictures. Goya would appear in these works to be carried away by his imagination, and he has presented to us a masterly panorama of all that is brightest and most joyous in the national customs—a panorama that pulsates with life, bubbles over with spontaneous merriment, and fascinates with its irresistible gaiety. We seem to hear the bells of the pony chaise and the pleasant jokes of the wenches at the fêtes on the banks of the Manzanares; the farces of Ramón de la Cruz are translated into the language of colour. And the pictures with children—happy, roguish youngsters—reveal not only marvellous skill, but a sympathy with the poetry and charm of childhood that has not been surpassed. Zapater tells us that Goya was often seen surrounded by children in his house by the Manzanares, and his whole-hearted love of childish grace and innocence is manifested in these studies.

Among his later work as a designer of tapestry one of the best examples is ‘The Earthenware Stall,’ which in its delicacy of colouring, its skilful arrangement of transparent draperies, and its brilliant lighting, is comparable with ‘The Village Wedding,’ which Cruzada declares to be the most graceful composition of the whole collection. Here the story is told with supreme humour. The stupid and happy youth in his finest attire walks beside his fresh-coloured bride who is bedecked with finery and ribbons, a priest and the parents and friends of the young couple accompany them, and the village piper marches in front surrounded by a crowd of singing, shouting, dancing children. In beauty of colouring this design is the equal of the handsome, graceful figures in ‘The Water-Girls,’ and in its mirthfulness and realism it is a companion to his illustration of ‘Blind Man’s Buff,’ which overflows with irrepressible merriment. Another notable design which is also the largest that Goya painted, is ‘El Agosto,’ a striking piece of work. ‘On contemplating this picture,’ writes the Conde de la Viñaza—who declares that it entitles Goya to be known as the Theocritus, the Virgil, and the Garcilaso of painting—‘the sun seems to burn and asphyxiate with its fire, the reapers appear to be dazed with wine, and we seem to hear the chirping of a cricket hidden in the sheaves. Of the children crying and playing on the hills of straw, some appear to be the children of Van Dyck, and others the work of the expressive hand that created the weeping Ganymede.’

The forty-six cartoons mentioned in the Prado catalogue—of which thirty-three are reproduced at the end of this volume—are now contained in the Goya Room of the Madrid Gallery. During the reign of Isabella II., Frederico de Madrazo, the director of the Royal Gallery, repeatedly importuned the administrators of the Royal Patrimony to exhume the Goya designs from the cellars of the Tapestry offices to which they had been consigned, and to have them restored and housed in the Royal Museum. This request, however, was not conceded, and it remained for Gregorio Cruzada Villaamil to rescue them from the oblivion into which they had fallen. He succeeded in having the cartoons placed at the disposal of the Escorial Tapestry Museum Commission, and after being restored they were sent to the Prado. Unfortunately the works are difficult to restore and quickly deteriorate; for it was Goya’s practice to sketch his pictures with extraordinary rapidity, to surround the whole with carbon, and then trace his figures with the aid of aqua rás. Many of the studies in the Prado are covered with glass in order to preserve from total loss the canvases on which scarcely any oil has been used beyond that contained in the colours.

During these first years of his material prosperity Goya varied his work for the tapestry factory by producing genre paintings and a few portraits. He also began at this time to exercise his extraordinary powers as an engraver. As an exponent of genre he was unsurpassed, as a portraitist he was excelled by Velazquez alone, but his genius is more certainly demonstrated in his aquafortis work than in either his genre studies, his frescoes, or his portraits. ‘Goya was pre-eminently fitted, both by his environment and by his nature,’ writes C. Gasquoine Hartley, ‘to be the exponent of genre.’ The truth of this dictum is patent to all who study his canvases of this period. The customs that he depicted were the customs that he loved; the subjects, the people, and the passions represented are always real. He reveals both imagination and invention in the grouping and arrangement of the scenes. The vigour and boldness of his manner is revealed in the success with which he seizes, as with a camera, the fleeting movement—the unfinished smile, the arrested gesture—and seals it upon his canvas. His scenes of carnival and of merry-makings, his representations of bull-fights, and his sidelights on the Inquisition, are living phases of the life which surrounded him and in which he found his pleasure and his inspiration. The spirit of Goya is in all these pictures. His dramatic temperament, his fierce humour, and his imagination found their outlet in the life of the period and expressed itself in these paintings in which that life is immortalised.

In all that he painted Goya never lost sight of, if he did not always attain, his object of securing absolute truth of effect. Whether he is employed on a portrait, a representation of romance or diablerie, or a religious fresco, he is true to the principle explained in his own remark that ‘a picture is finished when its effect is true.’ And the truth of ‘his flashes of insight imprisoned in line and paint,’ give his work a sense of modernity which is seen in the pictures of few other artists. M. Paul Lefond declares: ‘More than any other painter of past periods he is made to be understood in our day. Something more and something better than a modern, the Aragon painter still remains a forerunner; he is still almost a contemporary of the generation to come. His manner of translating and interpreting nature is absolutely modern. He renders it as he sees it, with the comprehension of an artist of our time, daring and independent. He is more than a hundred years in advance of his century. His manner of portrait-painting is completely outside all theory of teaching; his fashion of treating frescoes is an extraordinary audacity. He has in his whole existence, without truce or compromise, been pursued by this idea of arriving at the true expression of life.’

It has been claimed for Goya that his genius was arrogantly unsubjective; that he had no master and was contemptuous of all rules. Originality and independence could go no further, and it may be admitted that he was intolerant of outside influence. But the spark of genius must be fanned into flame by the magnetic influence of example, and while Goya studied nature with a passionate and jealous devotion, he glories in the debt he owes to Rembrandt and Velazquez. ‘I have had three masters,’ he wrote to a literary friend, ‘Nature, Velazquez, and Rembrandt.’ Some have tried to recognise in him a disciple of Tiepolo, and his study of the aquafortis engravings of the Venetian may well have suggested his adoption of that so long neglected method of engraving, but as we should expect, he preserved an independent attitude of mind and developed a manner quite different from that of Tiepolo. There is no evidence, in his engravings, of any admiration for Tiepolo’s style, but his admiration of Rembrandt was as sincere as was his devotion to Velazquez. Gautier finds that Goya’s work reminds one of Velazquez and Rembrandt, ‘as a son reminds you of his ancestors, without any servile imitation—or rather, more by certain congeniality of taste than by any formal wish.’ ‘Goya’s love for the old masters,’ says Lafond, ‘is the best proof one can give of his sincerity. He did not think of inventing new processes; conscious that the same language is capable of a variety of expressions, he was content to master the technique of the past and to borrow from it all that best suited his individuality.’ But what he borrowed he moulded and modified to suit his own purposes; translating it into a language which was his own and in the process enlarging it with new and further life.

In 1779 Goya presented to the King his plates after the pictures of Velazquez. This series, which consisted of the portraits of Philip III., Philip IV., Margaret of Austria, Isabella of Bourbon, Prince Baltasar Carlos, the Count-Duke of Olivarez, and other etchings, are faithful though not inspired copies of the master. Goya wrote to Zapater that he had had the honour of being received by his Majesty and family when he submitted the plates for their inspection, and he adds, ‘I could not have wished them to be more pleased than they showed themselves to be on seeing them.’

Herr Valerian von Loga, who has an intimate acquaintance with and profound knowledge of Goya’s etchings and lithographs, has just published in Berlin a series of thirty-two reproductions of the rarest examples of the painter’s work in these media. The explanatory notes which accompany the plates are of great interest both to the student and the collector. This writer assumes that José del Castillo, who worked with Goya for the tapestry factory of Santa Bárbara, urged him to devote some of his restless activity to the etching needle. He holds that in his earlier attempts, and particularly in ‘The Flight into Egypt,’ the technique reminds one of Tiepolo. This etching is the work of an apprentice hand, and while it is not devoid of charm, it runs on bad lines. Goya’s acquaintance with the fundamental rules of etching was so imperfect that, in the first prints of his ‘St. Francisco de Paula,’ the inscription C. A. R. J. appears turned the wrong way. It is the opinion of Herr Valerian von Loga that in almost all the plates executed at this period there is a certain emptiness and unsteadiness of drawing, while the unsuccessful handling of light and shade betrays the work of the beginner, but ‘what is new and original, and above all, characteristic of Goya, is the manner in which the whole is worked out according to the painter’s mode of working. We see the artist taking pains, not to give form to the things themselves, but to their appearance. On this account outlines are omitted and contours left open, and there are no regularly-growing, flowing lines, while parallel and crossing strokes are rare. The dark surfaces are composed of a great number of short, chopped-off strokes; the entire workmanship is nervous and undecided. It is clear here that the ability of the artist was far behind the good-will, and at times too his inspiration was insufficient.’

In his copies of Velazquez Goya appears to have been the first to introduce into Spain Le Prince’s ten-year-old process of aquatinta, a process which in later times he developed to the highest perfection. In 1779 he brought out an etching from one of his own designs for the tapestry factory. His work so pleased the Prince of the Asturias, for whom it was executed, that the painter is credited with an intention of publishing all his Santa Bárbara pictures as etchings. But his growing popularity as a portrait painter now claimed his activities for more remunerative work, and for more than ten years he laid aside the etching needle in favour of the brush.

We learn from a memorial preserved in the Palace Archives that the graciousness of his reception, the success of his tapestry designs, and the admiration that Charles III. had expressed for his two religious studies of ‘Christ Crucified’ and of ‘St. Francis,’ emboldened the artist to proffer himself for the position of Court Painter. This honour was denied, but he was elected a member of the Académia de San Fernando.

On January 24, 1781, Goya left Madrid for Zaragoza to assist in the redecoration of the Church del Pilar under the direction of his brother-in-law, Francisco Bayeu. The dissensions which arose out of this commission between Bayeu and Goya, and between Goya and the Building Committee, were bitter and prolonged. It is not likely that the biographers of Goya, without the facts of the dispute to guide them to a correct conclusion, would display much sympathy with a conventional, mediocre painter like Bayeu, or so nebulous a body as an archbishop’s chapter, and Zapater and Cruzada have revealed their hero in the light of a persecuted, long-suffering martyr. The vanity and envy of Bayeu and the wilful obstinacy of the Building Committee in their support of the older artist they hold to have been at the bottom of the matter. But the Conde de la Viñaza has exhumed the hard facts in the archives of the Pilar Cathedral, and from these it is now clear that the indomitable independence of Goya’s nature and his impetuous intolerance of all restriction have not been taken sufficiently into account by his biographers.

From the documents which Viñaza has brought to light we learn that the frescoes which Bayeu completed in the Pilar Church, in 1776, gave so much satisfaction to the authorities that they agreed to the artist’s terms for painting the round vaults and cupolas of the church. Four years later, when the Building Committee were getting impatient for the work to be put in hand, they granted Bayeu permission to engage his brother Ramon and his brother-in-law Goya to assist in the execution of the designs which he had already prepared. On October 5, 1780, Ramon Bayeu and Goya presented these designs for the vaults. The Committee found that they were ‘inspired by the greatest taste’ and decided to proceed at once with the work. It may be assumed that Francisco Bayeu arrived shortly after to supervise the operations of his assistants, and it was not long before the disagreements between Goya and his brother-in-law commenced. On December 14 Bayeu complained that Goya would not be subject to correction in the manner of his painting, and he asked the Committee that he might be relieved of his responsibility in the direction of the work, in so far as Goya was concerned. We read that ‘the Committee, taking into account that Goya had come to paint, owing in a great measure to the pressure and eulogy of Bayeu in his letters, agreed that the Building Director (Canon Allué) should see Goya and his painting frequently, and mention any defects he might notice and impress upon him how grateful he ought to be for the good offices of D. Francisco Bayeu in engaging him as his assistant.’

Although it is evident that Goya was already in revolt against the supervision which he had accepted as a condition of his employment, the trouble was temporarily overborne. From this we may conclude that the good Allué did not insist too much upon the gratitude which Goya owed to his brother-in-law. By February Goya had completed the painting of the dome, and he then submitted his studies for the four triangles formed by the arches supporting it. It would appear that the public had expressed their dissatisfaction with Goya’s compositions in the dome, and the Committee complained that not only were these new designs marked by similar defects of ‘drapery, colouring, and idea,’ but one of the figures represented came short of the standard of chastity that was required in pictures of this kind. The Committee, ‘fearing to expose themselves to fresh censure and an accusation of negligence and want of care, put this matter, by reason of the confidence he had won from the Committee and from the whole chapter, under the direction and in the hands of D. Francisco Bayeu, hoping that he will take the trouble to see these studies and say whether the observations of the Committee are just in deciding that the triangles be painted in such a way that they may be shown to the public without fear of criticism.’ But when this resolution of the Committee was communicated to Bayeu, he retaliated with a tirade upon his offended dignity, and we find Allué appealing to Goya to ‘see if there be any way of arranging the matter, knowing that the Committee desire harmony, and do not wish to expose their conduct to censure, but desire only that the work be skilful and perfect.’

To this appeal Goya returned what we may describe as a characteristic letter. This epistle has been published in Spain, but no translation has hitherto appeared in England. The letter is as follows:—

Memorial of Goya to the Building Committee.

D. Francisco de Goya, Member of the Royal Academy of San Fernando, respectfully shows: That after having put the works of his profession before the public, namely, the paintings just unveiled at the Church of Our Lady of Pilar, his attention had been called to the opinions he hears expressed, containing a criticism prompted by a principle other than that of justice, or governed by the authorised rules of art, which only should form the opinion regarding the work; and although he cannot believe that ill-meant prejudice has gained access to your rectitude, or that you could be led away by impulses little in accord with reason; yet the honour of a professor is a very delicate thing; opinion is what sustains him, all his subsistence depends on his reputation, and when that is obscured by even a light shadow, his fortune is gone; therefore Nature warns him to take care of it by using all the defences within his reach, and to omit the least would be to gain a slight advantage by abandoning the greatest treasure the Creator had entrusted to him.

These principles, accompanied by a sense of wounded honour, the expositor hopes his explanation will make evident to your benignity.

D. Francisco Bayeu asked that the work in the domes might be done by his brother and the expositor, but it was on the understanding that the latter should do one of the parts by himself, as Bayeu himself agreed, considering that the degree of an honoured member of the San Fernando Academy, acquired by the work which had won great renown for him in Madrid, in addition to the work for H.M., would not admit of his absolute subordination to another professor without detriment to his honour. The expositor might be wrong in this, but his error would have the approbation of D. Francisco Bayeu himself, who agreed to it, and was a trustworthy witness of the success that might be expected; and also that of the chief Presbyter Allué, to whom through some people in the city he had manifested the same opinion, to which he agreed.

The expositor feeling sure of said promises, with all good faith in them, proceeded with the Study or Design, and as he wished to be on good terms with D. Francisco Bayeu he took it to him, and received his entire approval: he came with him to this city: he began his work by consulting him regarding the place where the principal façade should be put; the expositor gave way to Bayeu’s opinion. He presented the design to you, who approved them; and in executing them he has only enlarged them.

Taking into consideration these harmonious dealings of the supplicant with D. Francisco Bayeu, which created no motive for resentment, and were governed by the principles and rules prescribed in the first and only conversations regarding the matter, who could think that the expositor had been wanting in respect to Bayeu? There are those who think so, because when the work was well in hand, they wished to make him understand that the agreement with Bayeu was that he should interfere as much as he liked with the expositor’s work, and that the latter should obey him as a subordinate in execution, placing of figures, style, colouring, and so forth; in a word make him a mere executor and mercenary subordinate; but as this was in direct opposition to what had been agreed, it would have been discreditable to his honour to yield, as he would be losing what his merit had won for him, and he could not therefore so humiliate himself, for he knew that the previous offices were sufficient, and that similar ones if continued would not make them anything but his own production. D. Francisco Bayeu’s warning to you that he would not be responsible for his part of the work, only shows that his object was to create a want of confidence that should cause coercion to be exercised, which was justly resisted, for doubt as to skill and success sat ill on D. Francisco, who knew quite well of the honours acquired by the expositor in Madrid, both from the Royalties and from all who had seen his productions, all executed by himself without the slightest direction from any one.

After this, things were artfully circulated against the conduct of the expositor, concerning his temper, proceedings and dealings with Bayeu, he being accused of hauteur, pride and stubbornness. Thereafter malice prepared the blow, long premeditated, of first creating personal disaffection, and then disaffection with his work; as shown by the reception of his work in the dome of the Cathedral of Our Lady. The criticism passed by some persons can only be attributed to this, because all its merit is unobserved and only the defects suggested by caprice or ignorance are sought.

He has suffered with resignation the insults to his honour, he has had the patience to see that the same Bayeu who impaired his credit with insinuating words, and the deceitful complaint that he was responsible for the success of the work, and that he would have to give an account of the confidence placed in him, and that the supplicant was depriving him of this satisfaction because he would not allow him to correct or alter his productions; on other occasions defended the expositor, exalting his merit, acknowledging his skill and the correctness of his painting.

The insinuations of Bayeu have led to the conclusion that the expositor came to this city as a mere subordinate of his, and that notwithstanding this absolute dependence, his proud spirit would not submit to asking for instructions from D. Francisco, even on the ground of friendship and relationship. Two entirely false propositions, which are the cause of all the supplicant’s trouble, because regarding the first he has already told you about the agreements that preceded his coming to Zaragoza, and regarding this and the second, D. Francisco Bayeu cannot deny that, as the result of those agreements, the expositor executed the studies and designs in Madrid, showed them to him, received his approval, and no fault was found. The studies are the complete work, with the same figures, colouring and arrangement to be observed, and the work itself an entire copy of them; and if they passed his examination in Madrid as an act of condescension on the part of the supplicant, emanating from his desire for peace, why, if as he says he was responsible, did he not then point out the defects he might have noted? He did not do so; then what is to be inferred from his having concealed them, if he noticed them? Obviously, and no dissimulating artifice can hide this, it may be gathered that his object was for the expositor to be in error, receive indignant public censure, and lose all the merit and status won by his work. But not wishing to believe such malevolence, because other proofs would be required of it, it must be admitted either that he found no defects in the studies or designs, and therefore the painting on the dome, which is the same, has none, or that D. Francisco was most culpable who, knowing of them, said nothing and allowed them to be copied.

The expositor has never departed from that friendly subordination, nor attempted to oppose D. Francisco Bayeu with the proud spirit of which he is accused; a proof of this is what has been said about the designs; another, the placing of the principal façade; and, lastly, the many visits he paid him at his own house, even though they were not returned. On being informed that the Chapter wished Bayeu to inspect the work on the dome, he arranged for him to do so, which he did, accompanied by the chief Presbyter Allué, and in his presence admitted and acknowledged the perfection of the work, saying that what he had been informed was not true; he also saw the designs for the triangles, and approved of them.

In face of all this, the expositor finds that the same bitter opposition which he had thought would cease, still continued, because the sense of truth may be suspended but not extinguished, but seeing that there is no hope of staying the torrent of provocations that insult his honour and fame, and that an honoured professor cannot stand for ever against the opposition of his enemies, whose only object is to work him ill; notwithstanding that he thought he must finish the work on the triangles, he has at last been undeceived by the letter which the chief Presbyter Allué had just sent to him, of which he sends you a complete copy. After the calumnies he has had to endure, the slights and contempt with which he is treated will not permit him to continue to expose himself to some greater misfortune. He now humbly shows, and at the same time sets forth that he has heard that some figures were to be altered in the dome, and although the expositor cannot be sure that you will allow yourselves to be guided by the declamatory voice of the ignorant public, or the opinion of rivals, the right he has to defend his honour leads him to forestall you. Before a daub is put in the Church that will obscure and deprive it of merit, and leave a permanent witness of the ignorance which is a reproach: which is now the only thing in the matter that interests him, and regarding which he appeals to you—because the will of the owner in his own house does not let go the reins of liberty to such an extent, merely in order to exercise his authority, as to permit without cause, and quite uselessly, great detriment to another on a point so delicate as honour—the expositor thinks the best way to appease the want of confidence he presumes in others and to assert his own opinion, is that a person expert in the art, authorised in his profession, and whose opinion would be impartial, should minutely inspect the work, and when his criticism detects his unskilfulness and error, or testifies to his sufficiency and skill, he will watch with indifference any mutilations executed. Therefore he humbly begs that you will arrange for the work in the dome to be seen by one of the members of the San Fernando Academy, one of the most renowned, as D. Mariano Maëlla or D. Antonio Velazquez, at the expense of the expositor, and after careful inspection his declaration be accepted as testimony.—Zaragoza, March 17, 1781.

Francisco de Goya.

Upon the receipt of this letter, which may be left to speak for itself, the worthy and sorely tried Allué seems to have invited the mediation of Father Salzedo, who was, perhaps, the only man to whom the irascible Goya might be expected to listen. Salzedo wrote the painter a long, earnest epistle, in which he appealed to his better judgment and prudence, cited instances of humility in the life of Christ for his guidance, and demonstrated the practical advantages that would be derived from doing his work to the satisfaction of the Building Committee. The good father did not hesitate to tell his friend that he had taken up a wrong attitude towards his brother-in-law and the Cathedral authorities, and plainly exhorted him ‘with all generosity and Christian charity, to submit your studies to Bayeu’s opinion, in order to please God by your humility, edify the public, and give pleasure to your friends.’ And he adds in conclusion: ‘My dictum, as your greatest admirer, is that you submit to the demands of the Committee, have your studies taken to your brother’s house, and say to him in the best manner possible: This is required by the Chapter—here they are; examine them to your satisfaction, and put your opinion in writing, doing this as God and your conscience shall dictate, etc. And then await the result.’

The foregoing letter was dated March 30, 1781. On April 6, Goya wrote a conciliatory note to Allué, promising to make fresh studies in consultation with Bayeu. Eleven days later the Committee approved the new designs and expressed their pleasure at finding him reconciled to his brother-in-law. But the truce, for such one supposes it to have been, did not last. From a minute in the report of the Building Committee’s proceedings on May 28, it is recorded that Goya, in a ‘not very courteous’ manner, had told Allué that he was only losing his reputation in Zaragoza and desired permission to return to Madrid as soon as possible: ‘The Committee resenting this further affront, resolved: First, that the Professor be paid for his painting. Second, that under no circumstances would he be permitted to continue to paint any more in this Church, but that this need not deter the Director from giving some medals to his wife, in virtue of her being the sister of D. Francisco Bayeu, who was so worthy of this and other considerations from the Committee, by reason of his skilful work in this church.’

The source of the trouble was the failure of the Committee to accept Goya at his own estimate, which was certainly the true one, as the superior of Bayeu. The young painter doubtless did his best to follow the advice of Father Salzedo, but he wore the robes of humility with a bad grace, and was impatient of ignorant and pedantic criticism. His position had become untenable. The painter received his payment, his wife accepted her medals, and they left Zaragoza for Madrid in June 1781.

Goya was indulging no empty boast when he intimated, in his memorial to the Building Committee, that his renown in Madrid was widely acknowledged. He was no sooner back in the capital than the Conde de Florida Blanca sent him a royal order to paint one of the pictures for the Church of San Francisco el Grande. The favoured minister also presented him to the Infante don Luis, the brother of the King and husband of Maria Teresa Vallabriga, who at once conceived a great liking for the painter. He spent a month at the palace of Arenas de San Pedro, and was entertained with great hospitality, while he executed portraits of the Infante’s family. He also painted for the Consejo de las Ordenes several devotional pictures for the Calatrava College at the Salamanca University. In his leisure hours he worked at his picture in the Church of St. Francis. This work was not completed until November 1784. The pictures were ceremoniously unveiled on the 8th of December, in the presence of the King and his court. The occasion was a triumph for Goya. Other pictures had been painted by Bayeu, Mariano Maëlla, Gregorio Farro, Antonio Velazquez, Joseph del Castillo, and Andres Calleja. But their work was eclipsed by the composition in which the magic brush of the Aragonese represented San Bernardino de Siena. The saint is shown with a crucifix in his hand, standing on a rock, preaching, by the light of a brilliant star, to the wonder-filled King Alfonso of Aragon and his court.

Great was the admiration which this picture won for the artist, but, as was usual in Spain, he experienced much difficulty in obtaining payment for his work. In April 1785 we find Goya, Farro, and Castillo memorialising the Conde de Florida Blanca for pecuniary acknowledgment of their labours, explaining that they had each spent two years in making sketches and studies and in the execution of their several pictures, and pointing out that they are obliged to gain their livelihood with their work and ‘have no income or assistance, like others who have the good fortune to serve his Majesty.’ This memorial was despatched with a covering letter from Antonio Ponz, who emphasises the fact that the painters are in need, and hopes that their request will be complied with, ‘in order that these poor men may not lose heart and that reward shall hearten them to fresh work.’ Three months late Florida Blanca arranged with the general directors at the post-office to hand the artists ‘six thousand reals for the present until something else is arranged.’ This payment is duly noted on the memorial, and a later marginal order, presumably in the Count’s handwriting, reads: ‘Pay another 4000 reals to each, although the pictures are nothing wonderful, but theirs are the best.’ This grudging eulogy was in striking contrast with the enthusiastic praise bestowed upon Goya’s pictures for the Salamanca College by the Consejo de las Ordenes, who instructed Jove-Llanos to assure the artist that he was ‘singularly satisfied with the care and diligence with which he had finished the paintings and with their eminent merit.’

In the year of his return to Madrid Goya’s father died, and the painter sent for his mother and his brother Camilo to join him. He obtained for Camilo a chaplainship at Chinchón, but his mother soon wearied of the unaccustomed noise and bustle of the city and retired to Zaragoza, where she lived on a pension of five reals per diem provided by Goya. The artist at this time may have found some difficulty in providing for his household; for his family, if not long-lived, was numerous, but it is unlikely that he ever felt the pinch of poverty. We can well believe that he was insistent in obtaining the reward of his labours, especially when he was working for princes who, in his view, were living a life of gilded pauperism, and the stress which Ponz lays upon the needs of these ‘poor men’ is far removed from the attitude assumed by Goya. In the letter, in which he applies for payment, he does not plead for a dole in relief of his poverty, but demands the remuneration which is justly due to him. This is the only recorded instance of his being in financial straits. From this time his career is one of eventful and interrupted but assured success. Fame and fortune attended him on either hand. In 1785 Andreas Calleja died, and Goya succeeded him as deputy director of the Academy of San Fernando, with an annual salary of twenty-five doubloons. Four years later, on the death of Cornelio van der Goten, Charles IV., who had just succeeded his father Charles III., appointed him a Painter of the Chamber, with a salary of 15,000 reals, which was increased in 1799 to 50,000 reals a year, with the rank of first painter to the King.

In this period of his greatest prosperity, Goya was courted not only for the sake of his art, but also for his personal qualities. He was popular with men, while women eagerly contended for his favour. A revolutionary, he became the friend of the King, while the Queen and the Countess of Benavente delighted in his companionship. He went from palace to palace and from fête to fête, observing, working, studying, revelling in the life by which he was surrounded and in which he played a full part. This lover of freedom could breathe in an atmosphere of corruption; this son of the soil could play the courtier with a will. ‘If we are to understand his genius rightly,’ says C. Gasquoine Hartley, in A Record of Spanish Painting, ‘all contradictions are solved when we realise that he was an onlooker at, rather than an operator in, many incidents of his life.’ This half-hearted attempt to condone the irregularity of his life at this period is at variance both with what we know of Goya’s temperament and with the facts. He was an actor as well as an interpreter of the scenes which he represents, and many of his pictures, which are regarded as biting satires of the follies and vice of his age, are quite as plausibly explained as the expression of personal animus and party feeling. Certain people have discovered in Goya a moralist after the style of Hogarth, using his brush in the sacred cause of morality, to expose the vices of his time, laying bare the baseness of his contemporaries in order to inspire contempt and horror of their conduct, stigmatising the habits of the court of Charles IV., and castigating the hypocrisy, ignorance, and immodesty of the men and women who surrounded the royal family. But while in the later works of his mature age he employed his brush and needle to this purpose, it is more probable, as Lafond concludes, that under Charles IV. and Maria Luisa, Goya drew and engraved, as La Fontaine wrote his fables: for the pleasure of producing them, from the necessity of multiplying them, not troubling himself about questions of morality or of the lessons which his pictures should teach. ‘The truth is,’ says his French biographer, ‘that, mixed up in the intrigues of the Court and involved in personal quarrels, he takes the part now of one, now of another, using his pen to scratch his adversaries of to-day who are his allies to-morrow.’ In all his works he imbued the subject with the quality of his thought as well as with the charm of his colour and the skill of his draughtmanship. Of all the artists of his class, says the Boletin de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, none put into their studies more meaning and personal opinion. If he painted a scene he attached to it a proverb or a significant ejaculation; if he produced a portrait he left upon the likeness his opinion of his model; if in many cases it amounted to a positive caricature, he could no more help seeing his subject in that guise than his subject could avoid so appearing to the artist.

With regard to Goya’s personal life at this period it is not necessary to say much, but it would seem to have been consistent with our knowledge of him and of his surroundings. Lafond reminds us that his wife bore him twenty children and continued to love him in spite of his endless infidelities. Mr. Rotherstein declares that while it would be idle to pretend that he was faithful to his wife, it is undeniable that he was deeply attached to her during her lifetime. With the single exception of his devotion to the unfortunate Duchess of Alba, says the same writer, his intrigues seem to have been as much caprices on the part of his sitters as his own. But these caprices were, as it has been said, endless. ‘We have only to look at the master’s self-portrait,’ writes Richard Muther, ‘at this man with the bull-neck and full, sensual lips, to understand that the countless stories which got about on the subject of his relations with the women of high society in Madrid were not all inventions of the fancy. Goya must have been a terror to all their husbands. In all the most aristocratic salons the women were at his feet; and perhaps they appreciated the difference between this sturdy man of the people and their decadent lords and masters. In a word, Goya at this time not only painted Rococo, but lived himself to its full the wild passionate life of that Rococo period.’ And again, in the Boletin de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, we get the shrewd and common-sense conclusion that ‘Goya was a man of his age. He neither aspired to the category of an ascetic nor opposed the customs and tendencies of his time, and his age being one of transition, without fixed principles, he accommodated himself to its duties and its weaknesses, never for a moment failing in his domestic obligations, yet not refusing those outside favours that presented themselves to him.’

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.’