In the autumn of 1786, Goya went to the Escorial to present sketches for a new series of tapestry cartoons destined for the dining room of the Pardo palace. As well as the celebrated four Seasons, these included the first serious social paintings to appear in his work; the Poor at the Well and the Injured Mason. The subjects are bleak, the treatment clinical; both are related to the magnificent Winter cartoon, which has wind-whipped peasants and their burro battling against a snowstorm. The Mason, in particular, has often been taken as evidence of that humanitarian, populist, even democratic drive within Goya which was to explode into the unforgettable drawings and engravings of his later life [28].
This belief is mistaken. Edith Helman, quoting Ortega y Gasset to the effect that there is a chilling emptiness at the core of many of Goya’s paintings, an emotional distance between author and subject, an absence of commitment to anything other than the solution of a painter’s problem, is able to make summary execution of this masonic mythology. 1
The cartoon, impressive in its handling of distance, physical posture and nuanced greys, is striking in theme but cool to the point of neutrality in sentiment. She plausibly suggests a proximate source in the famous edict of Charles III which drilled the building industry in worker safety, inflicting prison sentences and fines on negligent employers. Promulgated in 1778 and re-issued at intervals, it had been eulogized as recently as 1784 in the Memorial literario ; the ilustrados, who were increasingly shaping Goya’s word of social intimacy, hailed it as a very model of enlightened legislation. In 1786 Goya was appointed Pintor del Rey (King’s Painter) and, with his brother-in-law, granted a monopoly at the Tapestry.
Far from being a social protest or even comment, the cartoon was a courtly gesture in fashionable taste. There was, further, its notorious twin the Drunken Mason, a smaller sketch which
28. The injured mason, 1786-7
29. The drunken mason, n.d. 1791 ?
Goya later sold to the Duke of Osuna [29]. Virtually identical in pattern, this plastered grotesque and rather sinister grins across the faces of the workmen lumping their sagging comrade from the scaffolding, drove out dignity and drove in that sardonic black humour which recalls the Caprichos.
What sort of ‘social commitment’ engaged the mind and spirit of a man who could touch up the one into the other?
Crushing though Helman’s deployment of the drunken against the injured mason may appear, the argument is insecure. We do not in fact know which came first. The drunk appears in a clutch of works sold to the Duke of Osuna; Goya presented his account for some of these, together with later sketches, in 1798. His editors believe these little paintings to have been (as most of them clearly were) preliminary sketches for the original royal cartoons, but the Osuna order for payment is ambiguous in its wording, which seems to suggest that some at least were made for the Duke. 2
The suggestion that the drunken mason was prepared as a cartoon, presented to the King, rejected and then reformed, is difficult to accept; the piece would have been grotesquely, even insanely, out of harmony with its companions. Several interpreters see it as a later composition. If Jose Gudiol was correct when he once placed it in 1791, the sketch would not only take on the aspect of a parody, it would fall into significant alignment with two royal cartoons which Goya drove himself to produce in that year of deepening personal, professional and political crisis - the Manikin and the Wedding, in which the preoccupations, and to some extent the style, of his post-1792 travail are already reflected and which, without doubt, register an important change in his published attitude towards the pueblo [34,35]. The drunken- mason sketch, in fact, might serve as evidence, less of Goya’s social indifference in 1786 than of a profound change in outlook which began to grip him on the very lip of his most desperate personal crisis.
This leaves Helman’s central argument unscathed: the ‘populism’ of the Mason, the poor at the well and the peasants in suffering season, is factitious. With the ambiguous exception of his solitary original engraving at that time, the Garroted Man of 1778-80 [27], prophetic in its remorseless realism, there is no trace of any social feeling in Goya’s work before the 1790s. The many popular themes in it were common and merely fashionable; several may be traced directly and all indirectly to the familiar world of the sainetes of Ramon de la Cruz, the popular verses of such as Gregorio
de Salas and so many others; the earlier pieces steeped in that picturesque majismo which the aristocracy were beginning to adopt, the later in the more serious but still essentially bien-pensant modes of the Enlightened climax of Charles Ill’s reign.
If Goya had died from his illness in 1792 he would have been counted unremarkable except in occasional promise.
The occasions of promise, however, register before the personal disaster struck and they raise, very sharply, the central question of identity. Goya was forty before he broke through to success, to the possibility of realizing himself.
The whole thrust of his first forty years was towards the establishment of himself and his work in autonomous identity and integrity. The historian, in confronting an original creator, confronts in some measure the transcendental which puts the creator ultimately out of reach. If he is to incorporate the creator into the historical record in any meaningful way, he has first to try to take seisin of his historical identity.
Most interpreters point to a break, a divide, an abrupt and qualitative change in Goya’s career. Even Ortega is disposed to grant him a certain human engagement in his War drawings and the generality punctuate Goya’s life with the illness of 1792-3 which broke him and left him permanently deaf. In the first complete catalogue raisonne of his work, Pierre Gassier and Juliet Wilson sketch out five phases:
1746 - 1792 his first forty-six years, rich in production
after 1774 and in success after 1784, cut by the illness which nearly killed him in 1792.
1792- 1808
1808 - 1819
1819 - 1824
1824- 1828
the years of the Sanlucar and Madrid albums of drawings, the Caprichos and some of his most brilliant portraits.
the years of the War and the reactionary Restoration, years of the Disasters engravings, again cut by serious illness.
the Disparates engravings and the staggering Black Paintings, years of the liberal revolution and its defeat, ending in Goya’s departure into exile.
the final years in France, ending in death.
Of the 1900 works they catalogue, 700 were produced between 1808 and 1819 (between Goya’s sixty-second and seventy-third years) and four fifths of these were drawings and prints. In fact, graphic work accounts for two thirds of
the catalogue, drawings alone representing nearly a half of his entire output. Before 1792, drawings and prints were only a sixth of his work, while half his known portraits were painted between 1792 and 1808. Central to the shape of his life, then, is the crisis of 1792. After 1792 there is a decisive shift away from commissioned work into the personal statement and into the black-and-white. It was the breakthrough into freedom which he himself recorded in a letter to his friend Bernardo de Iriarte.
Edith Helman argues that this break-through into freedom was less an escape than a conquest. She buttresses her argument with a perceptive analysis of his self-portraits. 3 At moments important to him, he tended to paint himself into his pictures. These self-portraits, taken with the long series of revealing personal letters he wrote to his friend Martin Zapater of Saragossa, constitute a kind of diary. What the diary chronicles into the 1780s is an obsession with success, a drive to establish himself, both personally and as a painter.
Personal ambition, in fact, often seems to outweigh the artistic. A man of sanguine temperament, a lover of bullfights, chocolate, tonadilleras , he sometimes told Zapater that he preferred hunting to painting. In earlier years at least his attitude to his painting seems strictly professional in the narrow sense. In his late thirties he was ready enough to paint in styles and within limits which were not his, to accommodate himself to fashion. To a certain extent, this remained true all his life; in public affairs he was always a politique , even his exile may have been forced on him by his mistress. This particular form of adaptive egoism may help to account for both the periodic weakness in his work and for its increasingly ‘schizophrenic’ character.
For every one of the major illnesses in his life seems to coincide with a crisis in his development as a painter; every one strikes with an almost psychosomatic precision at a point where he was struggling against a sense of imprisonment, trying to break out into new explorations of skill and sensibility. As he matured, the problems, preoccupations, obsessions central to an original painter trying to realize himself seem to have taken possession of him; it is very probable that his gnawing hunger for the tangible esteem of others, for success in terms material and above all in terms of status , was identified with and incorporated in this demon drive for liberty of the self. What must command the historian’s mind as he approaches the crisis of 1792 is the
utterly egocentric thrust of Goya’s life at that point; everything outside himself was secondary, an instrument.
His first illness, in 1777-8, for example, came after he had been working for a few years on tapestry cartoons under the direction of his brother-in-law, Bayeu. After an almost anonymous start the cartoons for the Pardo in 1776-8, with their demand for popular scenes, diversions and costumes in picturesque style, unlocked his talents. A brilliant decorative success, these works were still essentially subordinate.
Already, in his first essays, Goya had displayed a striking originality. Helman has acutely analyzed these earliest paintings, notably the monumental compositions for the Carthusian monastery of Aula Dei in Saragossa of 1774, a portrait done in Italy in 1771 and a self-portrait made before 1775, and has demonstrated convincingly that many of the features considered characteristic of a later Goya were present at this early date. The self-portrait in particular, non-linear, a minor masterpiece in graduated light and shading, clearly belongs to the same order of creation as the infinitely more celebrated and sombre self-portrait of 1815, executed several lifetimes later. The face is young and unformed, the familiar eyes stare out, penetrating but cautious, suspicious, almost afraid; it is the face of a man stubborn in awareness of talent but notably insecure in its realization and recognition [30,1].
At this date Goya had won no clear success in Italy and had twice failed to gain admission to the Academy. In 1774 came Mengs’s invitation to work for the Tapestry. A powerful and original talent disappears to run underground through commissioned work in accepted style. And in 1777 the painter, thirty-one, married and with family, falls ill.
His response anticipates in a striking manner his reactions to later and more serious illnesses; he turned to engraving.
In 1778 he made his celebrated and crucial studies of Velazquez; the cartoon of the Blind Man with guitar is said to be the first unmistakably to register the influence of Velazquez, henceforth paramount. Equally striking in its anticipation, he may have been pointed in this direction by the leading ilustrado Jovellanos, called to court in 1778.
The reformer, elected to the Academy within a month of Goya, was always his warm admirer; he made the seventeenth- century painter the focus of his art teaching and counted Goya his true heir. It is known that Goya ‘delighted’ in Jovellanos’s conversation and that most of his Velazquez studies ended up in the collections of Jovellanos and his
31. Goya, self-portrait, in portrait of Floridablanca, c. 1781-3
protege the historian Cean Bermudez. The Blind Man cartoon, which Goya also engraved, was submitted in April 1778 but returned for correction in October; it is possible that Goya discussed it with Jove llanos. At all events, this concentration on Velazquez resulted in Goya’s first original engraving, the stark Garroted Man [27], and in a clear renewal of energy and naturalistic vigour, in cartoons, genre paintings and the charming series of children’s games. 4
The crucial years were those between 1780 and 1783. 3 In June 1779 Mengs died and Goya immediately applied for the position of court painter; he was rejected in favour of a nonentity. In May 1780, on the advice of Bayeu, he turned instead to the Academy, presented a heavily derivative Christ on the Cross and finally won admission. At this time, he told Zapater, he had scarcely 5,000 reales. In that same May he was commissioned to paint frescoes for the cathedral of El Pilar in his native capital of Saragossa. The commission brought humiliation. The committee of works found some of his panels too original for their taste and insisted that he repaint them under the direction of Bayeu; despite a dignified memorial which pointed to his membership of the Academy and work for the court and defended his independence as a painter, Goya was forced to surrender in 1781.
It was to escape from a morass of insecurity, therefore, that he threw himself into work on a San Bernardino altarpiece for the Madrid church of San Francisco el Grande which the Crown had made into a competition. In what had become a make-or-break enterprise for him, he laboured in total dedication from October 1781 to January 1783. His first commissions came through from the aristocracy, the rather naive and stiff portrait of the minister Floridablanca and the more genial series for the prince Don Luis de Borbon; into both, at this tense moment, he painted himself. Before the tall and icy Floridablanca who seems hardly aware of his existence, the painter appears small, uncertain, ingratiating, a pintorcito [31]; in the Don Luis family group, with its echoes of Velazquez, the atmosphere is less chilly, but the self-portrait equally supplicant.
Not until he completed the San Bernardino at the end of the year does the tone of his self-portraits change; in that work he stares boldly out, self-confident and challenging [32]. He had good reason; in 1784 the altarpiece was acclaimed and he broke through. He was made deputy director at the Academy; in 1786 Pintor del Rey. Commissions flowed in.
Jovellanos got him work at a Salamanca college, Cean Bermudez a series of portraits for the new national Bank of San Carlos; there were jobs in Valladolid and Valencia.
He established his vital connection with the household of the Duke of Osuna, whose Duchess ran the most celebrated salon in the capital. The nobility queued before his brush, and when Charles IV succeeded, Goya was made painter to the royal household in 1789.
His self-portraits acquire presence and dignity; he is the complete painter, the complete courtier, the complete success [33]. His letters to Zapater become an almost childish howl of triumph. He cannot breathe for commissions; the greatest in the land - and their names thunder out in a roll
33. Goya, self-portrait. Caprichos , 1, 1799
of honour - crowd his waiting room. His court salary is 15,000 reales ; the Academy and shares in the Bank bring in another 12-13,000. He buys an English two-wheel car whose driver can do the Neapolitan turn; there cannot be three like it in Madrid and the crowds gather wherever he goes. He kisses the hands of royalty, he is feted at the Osunas, where the rough shooting is so good. He buys a new English car, with four wheels this time. Zapater must be told every detail, the world must be told - particularly the world of his own Saragossa, where they don’t know a painter when they see one.
At the time of his ‘social’ cartoons, therefore, Goya was utterly absorbed in his own success; little else counted.
Yet, after five years of continuous personal, professional and social triumph, he ran into the most serious crisis of his life. This was the crisis which, in effect, fixed the Goya of history. Central to it was the crippling illness which decisively altered his manner of living. But devastating though that illness was, no less than those of 1777 and 1819 it seems to have been at least in part psychosomatic. The ‘noises in his head’ in 1793 echoed the beat of multiple frustrations on his brain. On few occasions has Aneurin Bevan’s aphorism been more apt: there is no immaculate conception of disaster.
In the first place, he began to feel strangled. As early as July 1788 he was complaining to Zapater about the crippling burden of commissioned work. Every assignment left him less satisfied; he began to long for freedom, for the personal statement, the capricho which would liberate him. A new pulse of enterprise and exploration was beating within him and his very success became a jail. After a wave of royal orders to celebrate the accession of Charles IV, a ‘disorder’ which appears to have been psychological hit him in 1790, the year in which, as an immediate reaction to the French Revolution, the government having imprisoned Cabarrus, exiled Goya’s friend and patron Jovellanos to Asturias. Partly to get rid of his load, partly to maintain that dignity which was now a preoccupation of his, the King’s painter refused to work on any more tapestry cartoons. By April 1791 the director of the Tapestry was petitioning the King; Goya, though painter to the court, ‘does not paint and does not want to paint’.
His salary was threatened and Bayeu intervened as arbiter.
By June Goya was confessing to a spirit of rebellion and announcing himself at work on the sketches. 6 The cartoons were being produced during 1792 as Spanish authority writhed before the threat from over the Pyrenees. In February Floridablanca was thrown out, to be replaced by Aranda, who relaxed the pressure. But in August came the overthrow of the French monarchy, the eruption of the sans-culottes , the first Terror. Moratin, in letters from France circulated among the ilustrados , voiced revulsion and despair; the enlightened were thrown into confusion. In November Aranda was out and an unbelievable Godoy, the Queen’s twenty-six year old cortejo , succeeded, to the shock, dismay and disgust of the Spanish public. In that same November Goya mounted his own untidy personal rebellion. He voted with his feet and left Madrid without permission.
His departure was without doubt a delinquency and he took pains to disguise it. He was at the Academy in September
and on 14 October delivered a report on the teaching of painting. He then disappeared. A letter which Zapater wrote to Sebastian Martinez of Cadiz in January 1793 reveals that Goya was then seriously ill in Martinez’s house and had been there for some time. Goya, through Martinez, asked Bayeu in Madrid to get him two months’ official leave; this was granted in January 1793 ‘so that he may go to Andalucia to recover his health’. At the same time the painter wrote to the Duke of Osuna to beg money; he pretended to be in Madrid, having been bedridden two months with ‘colic’, and asked for the money to be paid in Seville, where ‘he was going on leave’. The extraordinary pains which Goya took to blur the truth about his departure from Madrid were presumably designed to protect his position and salary.
The truth appears to be that Goya abandoned the tapestry work and a Madrid whose public climate had suddenly turned icy for ilustrados , probably early in November. He headed for Andalusia. He may have been going to Cadiz, where he did work for the Santa Cueva church some years later. He certainly went to Seville to stay with Cean Bermudez, who was then reorganizing the Archives of the Indies; he seems to have painted fairly freely in the city. Illness first struck him there, but he went on to the house of Sebastian Martinez in Cadiz. 7
Martinez was a wealthy merchant, another liberal and an official of a liberal city. A great collector, he was said to own 300 paintings and several thousand prints, including Piranesi’s prisons , and some English caricatures. Goya’s journey looks like, an act of liberation, semi-clandestine, a search for new sources and new energy. It is also notable that he moved along and maintained himself in a thin network of liberals who were entering a dark time. Probably the last painting he completed in 1792 was his superb portrait of Martinez, elegantly dressed in an appropriately French fashion. In his friend’s house the disturbed painter went down into the valley of the shadow of death.
To this evidence of change and disorientation before the onset of illness must be added that of two of the last tapestry cartoons themselves. The King had decided that the themes should be ‘rural and humorous’: Goya’s interpretation was idiosyncratic. He completed seven. Three were of children at play, one showed stilt-walkers in a majo context; the fifth was the beautiful and bien-pensant Maids at a Well.
Two however were radically different in kind from either picturesque or paternalist populism. The Manikin, a straw man tossed by grinning girls, anticipates in some respects
34. The manikin, 1791-2
35. The wedding, 1791-2
the style of his post-1793 work and generates tension and unease., while the finely executed Wedding is sardonic [34,35]. In it there appear the characters who loom so large in the Caprichos : the beautiful bride, the gross and repulsive husband, the smugly smirking and conniving priest and the hypocrite father. The humour is urban and black; in both one already senses the preoccupation with woman as the vehicle of corruption which runs through the graphic satire which occupied Goya’s mind two years later. Here, already, before succumbing to his illness, the painter is entering the world of the Caprichos - and if the Drunken Mason in truth belongs to 1791, the impression is strengthened.
This important change in Goya’s public attitude to the popular brings into sharper focus his relations with the radical ilustrados, whose response to the pueblo was necessarily ambivalent. Most of our evidence comes from the years immediately following Goya’s illness. Then there is no doubt. The ilustrados people his portraits; Moratin and Melendez Valdes are his close friends and his allies. His paintings reflect the latter’s work on lunatic asylums, the preoccupation with witchcraft which affected them all in confrontation with
a resurgent Inquisition. The ideology of the Caprichos is that of Jovellanos. The first foreigner Goya paints is the envoy of the regicide French republic. When the break comes in 1808 many of his friends rally to Bonaparte; in 1814 they join the exile exodus. Goya’s private drawings after Ferdinand’s restoration are explicitly, indeed harshly, liberal; their anticlericalism is ferocious. The painter’s intellectual conversion to a radical Enlightenment proved permanent.
One strongly suspects that it was his very ambition, his egocentricity, which took him into their ranks. In the last years of Charles Ill’s reign the drive for enlightened reform reached its climax; a lively and, in Spanish terms, relatively uninhibited Madrid press, led by the Censor , lived a time of hope, joyously pressing home the attack on the irrational, the archaic, the ‘barbarous’ in Spanish life, bringing the light of Europe to play on the hunched habit of that Black Spain so visibly in retreat. They had some warrant in the more prudent and bureaucratic Enlightenment which had captured the court and the administration, with men like Cabarrus and the more ambiguous Aranda perhaps providing the connection. The discourse, the manners, the attitudes of Enlightenment drenched many establishment houses even as others clutched at costumbrismo , at the majismo of the plebs in an assertion of Spanish identity against the incoming French tide.
Goya’s success carried him in the first instance into the orbit of the Osuna household. Here presided La Penafiel, the Countess-Duchess of Benavente, the most remarkable and original woman of her day. Neither beautiful nor eccentric like her rival the Duchess of Alba, she was highly intelligent, a wit, and elegant in an entirely French style, which Goya caught in his splendid portrait of 1785. A friend and patron of actors, artists and bullfighters, she never succumbed to majismo , but served as president of the women’s section of the Royal Economic Society of Madrid. Her husband was improver enough to gladden even an English heart and he sent promising men into France on scholarships. This household and its patronage was central to Goya’s establishment. 8
Into the more effervescent world of extramural luces he soon made his entry but at every important point his initiation was associated with prestige, respectability, success. It was Cean Bermudez who got him the commissions (and the shares) from the Bank of San Carlos, where he painted Cabarrus. Above all there was Jovellanos himself, established at court in 1778, preparing his reports on the theatre and on
Spanish agriculture, working from the centre to purge and revivify the ‘corrupted’ national spirit. Jovellanos joined the Academy a month after Goya; his Eulogy of the Arts, with its homage to Velazquez, singled out the aspiring painter.
At every stage Jovellanos was helpful and interested; he placed Goya in the Salamanca University commission, bought his prints, sponsored and nurtured him. Goya’s admiration was as warm and as generous as his portrait.
It was from Jovellanos without doubt that Goya derived an intellectual perspective on Spain. That perspective however was not achieved without travail and contradiction.
Edith Helman pointed to one example which may be developed. 9 In 1780 Goya painted a cartoon of the Tobacco Guards or excisemen which focused on a strutting central character in full brag who might have stepped straight off the boards of one of the popular comedies. In fact the cartoon is almost certainly grounded in one of the most popular tonadillas of the day, the Tonadilla del Guapo which celebrated the Andalusian exploits of Francisco Esteban el Guapo , a famous tobacco and salt smuggler who made a farce of authority. Smuggling has never been counted a crime by anybody except governments, and the piece, set squarely in the universal Robin Hood idiom, fitted well into a long and extra-legal Spanish popular tradition. Jovellanos, when he saw it, was affronted, as affronted as the magisterial Floridablanca, by its vulgarity and its flouting of the law.
His disgust parallels that of Melendez Valdes at much of the popular culture of the day. The ilustrados’ enmity towards the Inquisition rested as much on shame at the degradation of the Spanish people who accepted it - those huddled depersonalized crowds in Goya’s Capricho engravings - as on revulsion from its principles of action. These enlightened Spaniards, who drew their enlightenment from France and, to a degree, from England, were confronted by a sheer weight of native tradition which seemed weightiest of all among the very pueblo they wished to serve. Populist resistance to laws they too found unacceptable assumed forms which were equally unacceptable. This was a minor irritant. But it was a symptom of a deeper alienation, which in the end was to scatter them across the frontiers of treason and civil war.
No one would feel the tension more than Goya who had so much of the old Spanish Adam in him. Reminiscences of the Tobacco Guards cartoon flit through his 1790s drawings of smugglers, the ‘rustic traders’ of his Dream sequence, and the Boys on the Job Capricho : an entertainment edgily
converted into a charged and highly ambivalent moralism in the context of fierce social satire. The ambiguity, the paradox bit as deeply as his acid in more elemental matters. The sheer power of his graphic work derives from this very tension between intellectual conviction and a gut sensibility towards human realities, a dialectic which for the Spanish Enlightened was peculiarly searing.
What is certain is that before the French Revolution, adherence to the ilustrados implied for Goya a raising of his sights. He who so loved the bulls and the tonadilleras wrote to Zapater enclosing some popular music but pointing out that he rarely heard such stuff nowadays because he felt a man should cultivate a certain dignity. 10 How much greater then were the shocks of the 1790s on both sides of the Pyrenees which plunged the ilustrados into disillusion, cynicism and, for many, a despair which led them to Bonaparte? The first shocks were in some ways the worst.
The official and respectable world suddenly jammed on the brakes and went into reverse. In 1790 Floridablanca banned the import of French writings; in 1791 he suspended almost the entire Spanish periodical press; in 1792 power passed to Godoy. To a stupefied public the ‘unholy trinity’ of queen, cortejo and complaisant king seemed an appalling reversion to the worst days of the Decadence. Only yesterday Goya had been the climbing, crowing Goya of the Zapater letters, the Goya of the English car and the Osuna household, the Goya of the delightful and elevating conversations with that Jovellanos now bundled ignominiously back to Asturias.
To such a Goya the shock must have been peculiarly unhinging.
His response, as his work of the 1790s makes clear, was a strong, indeed passionate identification with the rationalist ideology of Enlightenment. But this commitment was now shot through with a sardonic alertness to chaos and the irrational. It could be morbid, even sadistic, particularly at the popular level. This was the tension which generated creative power. Its force derived without doubt from the change in his personality which the dreadful illness of 1792 effected. But the tension itself in its particular form was shaping earlier. It ran parallel to, was probably identified with, his increasingly intolerable frustration as a painter; these strains derived from basic drives in his character.
They drove him into his inept, instinctive ‘escape’ from Madrid. They were surely a contributory factor to his total breakdown in Cadiz.
36. Goya, self-portrait, c. 1795-7
What that illness was we have no means of knowing; long-range diagnoses are contradictory. Zapater’s comment that the breakdown was brought on by Goya’s own ‘thoughtlessness’ has been used by those who, inevitably, suggest syphilis (the more charitable make it ‘hereditary’), but the painter’s longevity and his survival of later disorders, one at the age of seventy-three, make this unlikely. We know that there were loud noises in his head, that he was for a while prostrate and paralyzed, for long unable to walk up and down stairs. There was ‘turbacion’, disturbance which was mental in character, and he was left permanently deaf.
His self-portraits in the mid-1790s are ravaged and arresting. To his enforced isolation from the world (which, of course, can be and has been exaggerated) his compulsory ‘detachment’ and vulnerability to his own morbid fantasies many have attributed the searing and nightmare realism of his often horrifying drawings, the fleshy actuality of his monsters, the violence, tragedy, diabolism of much of his work. That the breakdown and the deafness immeasurably deepened and sharpened the new vision beating at his brain can scarcely be denied [36].
The new vision found first expression in a set of cabinet paintings which Goya, recuperating in Madrid in the last half of 1793, sent to Bernardo de Iriarte at the Academy. ‘I have managed to make observations’, he told Iriarte in a letter of 4 January 1794, ‘for which there is normally no opportunity in commissioned works which give no scope for fantasy and invention.’ They are now identified as fourteen small paintings on tinplate. Eight are bullfighting scenes and six of these can certainly be located in Seville; they seem to have been painted before his illness. The remainder were done after it; the Yard with Lunatics Goya was still finishing when he wrote.
The Yard is dramatic and terrifying; in a lurid atmosphere of sharply contrasting light and shadow, naked lunatics struggle while an overseer whips them; there is passion, tension, distorted face and limb, a sense of mindless anarchy [37]. Three others deal with disaster: a fire at night, a shipwreck [39], brigands attacking a coach; two could be called genre studies, a marionette seller and strolling players. Evidence accumulates that the scenes were memories of Aragon. And the style has abruptly become that of the Goya of later life; even the marionette seller calls to mind the Black Paintings. Line is renounced, so largely is depth; all is ambience formed in flashes of light and shade shrouded in mist. Intuitive skill and bold execution shape volume,
37. Yard with lunatics, 1793-4
distance, light to a dramatic and expressionist purpose. Modelling is sometimes dense enough to be plastic. And in the subject matter, realism and deformation, violence, tragedy and unreason dominate. 11
A group of eight small paintings which Goya kept in his house and which are difficult to date are now thought by
38. Shooting in a military camp, 1793-4? 1808-12?
Jose Gudiol to belong to the 1793-4 period. They certainly are similar in character; significantly they were called ‘horrors of war’ and critics have related them to the Disasters engravings. One, a scene of soldiers firing on women in an encampment, may well be [38], but in truth these studies occupy a dark hinterland common to both the Disasters and the Caprichos. Most of them belong in the same world as Iriarte’s cabinet pictures. All have sharply focused spotlights against a dark and lurid background; four are interiors, prisons, plague hospital, cave; three are more violent bandit scenes, the shooting of prisoners, the stripping of a woman and the murder of one [40,41]. It is possible that some horrifying scenes in very similar style of savages at murder and cannibalism belong in the same series. 12
Goya’s new vision was a dark one, a realism twisted by manic passions, ferocious struggles spotlit in a sombre world, an inhumanity which was all too human, an explosion of violence and unreason into the world of tapestry and portrait and enlightened discourse. One further ingredient finished the witches’ brew his private painting had now become.
There is a touch of sadism in the woman central to his Shipwreck; in the woman stripped and murdered by his brigands, caught and raped in a hard sensual light, it is naked [39,40,41]. And in the albums in which he found free expression at Sanlucar and Madrid in 1796 and 1797, his drawings are drenched in eroticism.
39. The shipwreck, 1793-9
1793-4? 1808-12?
40. Brigand murdering a woman,
41. Brigand stripping a woman, 1793-4? 1808-12?
The eroticism stems from his celebrated association with the Duchess of Alba, which has become legendary. There is no evidence of any lasting association before 1795, when he painted a dazzling portrait of her in a white dress. At this time, recovering his strength if not his balance, he was turning out some of his most brilliant portraits, particularly of women. In May 1796 Goya left for Seville; he did not return to Madrid until March 1797. The Duke of Alba died in June 1796 and the summer Goya seems to have spent with the Duchess at the Alba residence in Sanlucar de Barrameda; he may not have left before the following spring.
The experience was devastating. According to a French traveller, every hair of the Duchess’s head excited desire.
She was a passionate, wilful, demanding, often eccentric woman, ringed with actors and bullfighters and given to maja styles. Bold and independent, she was a social rival to both the Queen and the Duchess of Osuna, flamboyant in her tantrums as in her humour. In 1796 she was thirty-four and Goya at fifty was inflamed, succumbing to one of those Violent and anguished passions of a man’s fiftieth year, the overwhelming love which one imagines will be the last’.
About his feelings there is little doubt. He gave her his most harrowing self-portrait [36] and in his house kept the magnificent portrait of her he painted under the Andalusian sun, in her black maja dress, wearing two rings inscribed Alba and Goya and pointing to her feet where are traced the words Solo Goya (later carefully overpainted by him) [42]. Whether she responded is uncertain. The motto was appropriately written in sand, for by 1797 Goya’s passion had turned sour. Two of the nastiest drawings for the Caprichos were directed against her in a peculiarly personal manner, pillorying her for lies and inconstancy and caricaturing her as a witch with an escort of literally hagridden bullfighters [43]. The destructive disillusionment and jealous fury in which the affair ended probably informed much of the sexual satire which burns through the Caprichos . 13
The Caprichos themselwes seem to have grown directly out of the albums of drawings which Goya began to keep in Sanlucar and continued in Madrid. 14 This was in fact his first known passionate spasm of drawing, which became the characteristic mode of his intimate self-expression.
The delightful little Sanlucar album is devoted wholly to girls. The Alba herself is recognizable at least five times, tearing her hair, nursing her adopted black girl Maria de la
42. The Duchess of Alba, 1796-7
Luz, raising her hand and writing at her desk. The other figures may or may not represent her. In an intimate paseo , black-haired girls swirl and sway across the pages, caught by deft and delicate touches of the painter’s hand in an evenly diffused light, a summer siesta of girls bathing nude, standing nude (or to be just to Goya’s style, naked), dancing, arranging hair, weeping, fainting in an officer’s arms, sprawling across beds in poses which authors persist in calling ‘ambiguous’ though there appears to be no ambiguity whatever.
43. Gone for good. Caprichos , 61, 1799
One of these drawings - of a girl pulling up her stocking - became the preliminary sketch for a biting Capricho. For in the Madrid album which ran into 1797, there is a change.
At first, the parade continues (some of the earlier drawings may in fact have been done in Sanlucar) but the album is larger and more ambitious; drawings are numbered and become compositions, the even light gives way to the dramatic contrasts of spotlight and shadow he had used in the 1793-4 paintings. The girls acquire companions and the paseo is
44. Masquerades, Holy Week 1794, 45. They’re sawing up an old woman (for Lent),
drawing B80, 1796-7 drawing, B60, 1796-7
peopled with majos, celestinas, procuresses, the whole panorama of Spanish sexual relations with which Goya had become obsessed and in which he clearly saw an analogue to the corruptions of Spanish society. Scenes become comments; the future Capricho against the duel is foreshadowed.
And suddenly at No. 55 (of 74 drawings) captions appear in full-dress Capricho style, sardonic counterpoint to the drawings, deepening the ambiguity and sharpening the thrust. At once, the witches enter; two men saw an old woman in
46. Good priest, where was it celebrated? drawing B86, 1796-7
half for Lent [45]; the style becomes biting and effective caricature. The Tobacco Guards flicker in, transmuted into smugglers - What good folk we moralists are! The Church is lashed in a sickening portrayal of flagellants [44], in greedy, guzzling monks, in a young priest pulling up his breeches in priapic obscenity and greeted - Good priest , where was it celebrated? [46]. We are in the immediate hinterland of the Caprichos [47].
47. And his house is on fire. Caprichos, 18, 1799
It was in 1797 that Goya was commissioned to paint six studies of witchcraft for the Osuna palace, black humour in his new style [48]. At the end of the century witchcraft was a fashionable topic; among the ilustrados it was something of an obsession, not least to Goya’s friend Moratin, in whose mind it was linked directly to its other self, the Inquisition, and in whose hands the Relation of the Logroho auto da fe of 1610 was being shaped into a weapon of Reason. And it was Moratin who now, as the liberals seemed to be shuffling back into government favour, began to work closely with Goya to turn his private drawings into a public satire. Witchcraft gave them a thread around which to weave it.
And surely this reflects a deeper reality for Goya?
The preparatory drawings for the Caprichos grew directly out of those inspired by the Alba affair; it was the exploration of Spanish sexual hypocrisies which was his point of entry into wider social satire. The Sanlucar passion had hit him on the very morrow of his devastating illness and his convalescent groping after a new and darker perception in painting.
His exorcism of this particular demon seems to have been a catalyst. It was the sorcery of women and the deception of sexual relations which at once symbolized and knit together the multiple hypocrisies and deceptions of a society which was aristocrat-ridden, priest-ridden, superstition-ridden; witchcraft was peculiarly apt. What could be more appropriate in a Spain ruled by Maria Luisa and her cortejo Godoy?
In his Caprichos , Goya pilloried a society which was literally and metaphorically hag-ridden.
In this private exploration driving into public satire Goya seems to have achieved catharsis; in 1797 there is a sense of equilibrium in him, even if an equilibrium of tensions. In the following year, in complete freedom, in his new style and in a new populism, too, he painted the superb frescoes in San Antonio Florida, today his mausoleum. The self-portrait he prepared for the Caprichos displays his new vision of himself: stern, sardonic, top-hatted bourgeois profile, the austere observer of the dismal theatre of Spanish life [33].
The launching of‘his satire was a question of politics and political timing. During his illness and personal travail Spain had entered the war of 1793 as a crusade and had reeled out of it in disarray and disaffection. A momentary lull in 1795 preceded re-entry into war, this time as France’s ally and shortly as her satellite. In 1797 came naval and economic disaster; Godoy went into temporary eclipse. At this point
48. Witchcraft, 1797-8
Goya, with Moratin’s help, shaped a series of seventy-two satirical etchings for publication.
He called them a Universal Language; he adopted the dream device of Quevedo. He prepared some cautious disclaimers, sugared the pill with an opening flourish of some rather playful ‘witches’ before leading into the satirical sequences. 15 They were not published. In November 1797, with Godoy shadowy in the background, government passed to the ilastrados. Jovellanos himself became a key minister and set about his reform projects, with the Inquisition a central target. And at this point Goya’s portraits become a political statement: over two years he made intimate studies of his liberal friends. They are all there, Jovellanos as minister, Urquijo, Iriarte, Moratin, Melendez Valdes, Saavedra - and with them the French ambassador, appropriately, for so many of them were destined for Bonaparte.
But resistance thickened around Jovellanos. His friends feared poison attempts on his life. Political initiative shifted to his enemies. By the summer of 1798 he was broken; in August he was disgraced and exiled. Godoy returned to the forefront, to hold a momentary balance between reactionaries and the surviving liberals, which began to slip swiftly towards the former.
It was then that Goya, as a new cycle of disillusionment and tension opened, turned to re-work his engravings. He cut out attacks on the Alba and the Queen which seemed too personal, but toughened and sharpened the rest. The finished Caprichos, in February 1799, he threw into the arena.
Within two days, as the liberal minister Saavedra was dismissed, they were suppressed.
With the Caprichos and the parallel achievements in his painting, the distinctive creative personality of Goya crystallizes. In a decisive, creative rupture, he achieves his historic identity. He still had thirty years of life and work ahead of him and creative crises in abundance. His work and experience over those thirty years, however, deepening and enriching though they were, represent in essence a development of that personality which took shape in the travail of the 1790s. This is particularly true of the Disasters of War and the great series of drawings and engravings. Poignant and transcendental though these are, they are recognizably further expressions of a perspective formed in the Caprichos.
They are further instalments of caprichos. They make graphic a precisely similar dialectic of tensions.
‘Genius’, of course, defies historical analysis. But even ‘genius’ is located in time and place and works with its time and place. It is possible to disengage and delineate the components which Goya fused into creative achievement. They all derive directly from the character of the painter and the character of his Spain. Central to his character was a driving self-regard which led him into creative rebellion and into Enlightenment, which determined his reaction to public policy and private disaster. Without his commitment to Enlightenment, and to Enlightenment in its peculiarly Spanish form, his work would lose half its power. The major tension within him was precisely that between Reason and his painful, living consciousness of the darker forces of the human, not least at the roots of that Spanish pueblo from which he had come, so many of whose instincts he shared. Nowhere else did that conflict take the form it took in Spain; nowhere else did the corpses of so many dead generations weigh with quite so particular and peculiar a heaviness on the minds of the living.
The Disasters of War are what they are because they were created by a Spaniard at a particular moment, and a particularly tortured and self-tortured moment, in Spanish history. Goya’s ‘genius’, it can be argued, would have found expression wherever he lived. This may be true but it is in fact beyond conception. The form of its expression, its very power, owe everything to the fact that Goya was a particular kind of Spaniard trying to live in a particular Spain.
If the historian pays proper regard to the frontiers of the possible and proper respect to the immunities of individual identity, the travail of Goya admits him to the travail of the Spanish people.
49. Allegory of the City of Madrid, 1809-10