The Goya who left for France in 1824, there to fill four more years with a creative intensity that defied his eighty years, left behind him the plates of his Disasters and Disparates and the Black Paintings. It was in these drawings and paintings made for himself, his caprichos, that he spoke freely. To anyone trying to locate Goya in the crisis of the Spanish nation, they pose very severe problems. They are very difficult to date and yet, at times, they clearly reflect a particular reality. What one can say is that the modes of his private creativity through these years can be traced back to his personal crisis of the 1790s but no further. The historical identity of Goya crystallized in that moment of 1792, in the cabinet paintings he sent to Iriarte in 1793-4, in the drawings at Sanlucar and Madrid in 1796-7 which debouched into the Caprichos.
The great bulk of his personal work henceforth falls into the three broad categories established then - Drawings considered as works of art in their own right, their captions an integral element of the enterprise, constituted into series in which the creator talks to himself and anybody who cares to eavesdrop, in a running and often sardonic commentary on the human.
An exploration of violence and unreason, dramatic in its experiments in technique.
An exploration of realism in genre paintings which, like the other two enterprises, take ordinary people as subject, develop character study in depth and ultimately approach the monumental.
His drawings run into the hundreds. 1 He began on them seriously at Sanlucar in 1796; in the Madrid album of the following year, captions in his peculiar style find their anchorage. The drawings end for a while after the Caprichos ; it was not until his ‘withdrawal’ from court in the face of clerical reaction after 1801 that he returned to the brush and wash.
The drawings before his departure for France have been grouped into four ‘albums’. Album is a misnomer: there is no evidence that they were ever bound; but they certainly ran in the series to which he had become addicted. The most significant is the series labelled Album C, for this proves beyond cavil that in 1820 Goya was a committed, indeed passionate liberal and anti-clerical. There is no trace of Ortega y Gasset’s ‘coldness’ here. So fierce are the drawings on prisoners and the Inquisition, so explosive the joy at the Revolution of Riego, so merciless the exultation at the unfrocking of monks during the secularization, that the inner Goya seems as much of an exaltado as his mistress’s son.
The earliest series is Album D, a small group numbered up to 22. It uses the same paper as the Madrid album, the same upright format, the same technique. It is evidently a continuation of the Caprichos , in a light mocking style, figures disporting in an even light, nearly all women, witches floating in the air, drooling over babies, with sidelong comments on marriage. They seem to have been done around 1801-3.
He abandoned them for the series known as Album E.
This was a very serious enterprise indeed. They were drawn on very fine-quality Dutch paper which must have been a luxury in Madrid at the time. Every drawing is carefully surrounded by a frame of a single or double ruled line, making it a ‘picture’ in its own right. Numbers and pencilled captions are inscribed outside the line. These are the largest drawings; the technique is handled with complete mastery and the scenes, very sparse in background, focus on figures drawn in robust realism. Every drawing expresses a particular idea, illustrated by the interplay between the often brilliantly executed figure and the caption; a moral commentary on men and women. The most finished of Goya’s drawings, they resonate in the mind. Precisely because they deal with ‘human’ attitudes, they seem almost ‘timeless’. One or two however can be related to a historical context. A cripple is shown with the caption, Hardships of the War; the series evidently straddled 1808. The Style is that of the Maragato paintings and his proletarian pictures, done between 1806 and 1812 [50,51,52,53]. One drawing on child education may reflect Godoy’s founding of a Pestalozzi institute in Madrid in 1806.
There is only one, however, which carries a direct reference to current events. To despise insults (No. 16) shows a Spanish bourgeois snapping his fingers at two dwarfish characters in Napoleonic uniform. Not far from it at No. 19
is a very striking drawing: ‘He doesn’t know what he’s doing’. A man of the people on a ladder, eyes shut, points at the statue whose classical head (generally a symbol for Truth or Liberty in Goya) he has just severed with his pickaxe [56,57]. This drawing, which Picasso directly imitated in his Dream of Franco , 2 immediately conjures up a vision of the servile crowd smashing the Stone of the Constitution in 1814, but if it is in fact a reference to an actual event, it must surely be a comment on the popular rising of 1808 itself. This would not touch the message (the coupling with the bourgeois contempt for the French calls to mind the burro-pueblo coupling of the Caprichos and the Populacho coupling of the
56. To despise insults, drawing E16, n.d.
Disasters) but would reinforce an impression of Goya as afrancesado. Another drawing of victims has been related to his paintings of banditry and war. The fact that banditry and war are often indistinguishable in his work before 1812 is itself significant, for in Album E war and politics are not subjects in their own right. They are simply included in a series of comments on the human predicament. They furnish more raw material for a capricho. But in truth, for all their stark directness, the Disasters of War do precisely the same.
57. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, drawing E19, n.d.
If the series in Album E can be placed roughly between 1806 and the early days of the war, that in Album F is evidently much later. This seems more preparatory in character; there are no numbers. The style is more varied, much freer, more dramatic, the chiaroscuro effects are often striking. One of the drawings is clearly related to the painting The Forge, which was done some time after 1812 [52]; another is the first idea for a lithograph which was made in 1819 and the figure of Truth which appears in the late Disasters of War prints around 1820 also appears here.
There are series on the duel and on Goya’s favourite sport of hunting, but there is no coherent pattern, except for the recurrent and hostile drawings of monks, violence and official torture. The collection is Restoration in tone.
The most informative series is that in Album C, which is the largest and which some think spans twenty years.
Numbers run to 133, and 124 drawings are known. Goya numbered them very carefully. Up to number 84 it is difficult to get any sense of coherence. The themes are deformity, women, love and marriage, violence and prisoners, and satire on the religious orders. There are themes reminiscent of the original Caprichos , but the treatment is more vivid, free.
The grotesque - and many are grotesque - remains human.
It has been suggested that the anti-clerical satires - O Holy Breeches is perhaps the most blistering - reflect the earlier secularization measures of Joseph Bonaparte, but they could equally reflect the Revolution of 1820. In fact the slightly manic distortion of realism in many of them, the distinctly idiosyncratic humour - A blind man in love with his hernia, Auntie Gila’s poove - are strongly reminiscent of the Disparates and the Black Paintings. There is a series of nine representing comic visions seen in a dream in a single night. This is very much Disparates country. Most of them seem to be late.
All doubt vanishes with the mind-racking series which begins at No. 85, a remorseless, driving display of victims of the Inquisition. This is Goya’s explosion of rage, his J 3 accuse! Seven of them parade in the conical hat, the coroza , and the san benito tunic of enforced penitence, hands bound and heads bowed. Their ‘crimes’ are listed, For this, for that . . . Por . . . Por . . . Por . . . For being a Jew, for speaking another language, for having been born elsewhere [58,59]. They run into harrowing scenes of torture and chained prisoners (parallel to his gripping engravings of prisoners of the same period) punctuated by cries of rage. Some of the historically
58. (Above left) For being a Jew, drawing C88, n.d.
59. (Above right) For having been born elsewhere, drawing C85, n.d.
60. (Below left) For being a liberal? drawing C98, n.d.
61. (Below right) You agree? drawing C97, n.d.
62. Many widows have wept like you, drawing C104, n.d.
63. (Above left) What does this great phantom want? drawing 023, n.d.
64. (Above right) Will you never know what you’re carrying on your back? drawing 020, n.d.
65. (Below left) The light of justice, drawing 018, n.d.
66. (Below right) Divine Reason, don’t spare one of them, drawing 022, n.d.
celebrated victims are named - Zapata , your glory will be eternal! Don’t eat, great Torrigiano! For discovering the movement of the earth (Galileo). But most are anonymous.
For being a liberal? to one woman chained by the neck [60]. You agree? to a man under torture [61]. Don’t open your eyes . . . It’s better to die . . . and to a huddled woman with her child outside a building bearing the arms of the Holy Office — Many widows have wept like you [62]. It is a massive and crushing indictment which can stand comparison with any of the great angers recorded in literature and art.
Then without warning, at No. Ill, a note of optimism creeps into the dungeons . . . don’t grieve, wake up, you’ll soon be free . . . and at No. 115, a blaze of light: a man, pen and ink and paper before him, kneels, face to the sun and arms outstretched in the pose that recurs constantly in Goya’s secular and religious work at this time . . . Divine Liberty! [68] Truth blazes in justice through the next drawings [65], and from No. 119 we are into a series of scorching jeers as monks and nuns disrobe. Will you never know what you’re carrying on your back? shouts Goya at a peasant hammering with a hoe, bent under the monk who squats on his shoulders (the burro again) [64]. A skeletal figure snarls out of his cowl - What does this great phantom want? [63]. And as the convents disgorge and their inmates strip, a fierce yet classical woman, scales of justice in her hand, whips mercilessly at a flock of black crows . . . Divine Reason, don’t spare one of them [66].
There can be no mistake: it is the coming of Riego.
This Restoration-Revolution of 1820 series leaves one breathless and fixes the Goya of 1814—23. If one looks more closely at this oeuvre of drawings, it seems to fall into two sectors. Albums D and E more clearly belong in the world of the Caprichos , are more detached (though not necessarily less committed) in their commentary and appear to be early, certainly pre-1812; they probably end in the early years, if not months of war. Albums C and F seem distinctly later. They are fiercer, freer, more direct, more grotesque and evidently rooted in the Restoration. There is something of a gap spanning the central years of the war. That the experience of war would have an effect, no one would deny. But the anger and exultation of the later drawings stem not from the war but from the Restoration and the Revolution of 1820.
And it was in that state of anger that Goya completed the Disasters of War themselves.
The gap in his drawings was filled by his work on the first two of the three series of plates which made up the final
Disasters. We know that he began on the first series in 1810 and worked in some dedication. Faced with a shortage of materials, he broke up two of his older engravings to use the plates. This was when he was at his most afrancesado, painting the Josephines and receiving the Royal Order from Bonaparte. His commitment to the engravings was real, but it may well have been the commitment of an artist to a challenge to his craft.
Move now to his personal paintings. Two themes emerge from his Caprichos crisis of the 1790s-the exploration of violence and the realist exploration of the pueblo. The violence in his paintings has clouded analysis. It first appears in the bandits, shipwreck, madhouse of the cabinet paintings of 1793-4. A whole cluster of personal paintings chronicling violence, however, seem to run into the war years and, with the Disasters and the Second and Third of May paintings in mind, many critics have simply labelled these paintings ‘horrors of war’. In fact, there is considerable doubt.
In the inventory of paintings in Goya’s house in 1812, a dozen were listed as ‘horrors of war’. The collection of eight paintings owned by the Marquess of Romana have been identified as some of them. In fact, these Romana paintings seem to bear precious little relationship to any war. Five of them are roughly 40 x 32 cm. Two of these, interiors, a monk visiting a woman and what looks like a prison, are in fact reminiscent of the Caprichos. The other three, with figures spotlit in general gloom, are of brigands shooting a prisoner, murdering a woman and stripping a woman [40, 41]. With their erotic overtones, they are very similar to the cabinet paintings of 1793—4. Jose Gudiol in fact now places them in the earlier period, while Jutta Held, on stylistic grounds, dated them around 1810. The other three, roughly 56 x 32 cm and lateral, are similar in style. One shows men shooting at fleeing women and is certainly reminiscent of the Disasters [38]. The other two are interiors, a cave and a building, with huddled figures and the common spotlight effect. One of them strongly resembles a late Disasters engraving of the famine, but if there was a model, it is this Romana painting which must have provided it, since it is certainly earlier than the Disasters plate. Despite the uncertainty of the shooting scene, the whole group seems stylistically similar to the 1793-4 paintings. Perhaps one can detect a development in technique. The emphasis is far more on ‘bandits’ than on ‘war’. The fact that the later war prints resemble these earlier ones may carry its own significance. The cannibal and savages paintings
(which were once related quite without warrant to the martyrdom of French Jesuits in America) clearly belong in the same family. 3
Another group of six paintings (one of which has disappeared) were numbered X9 in the 1812 inventory and were labelled ‘horrors of war’ by a visitor to the house of Goya’s son. Again, the connection with war is dubious. There is a prison scene, a religious procession; the missing painting showed monks burning books. There is a group carrying a dead man, labelled by someone ‘The hanged monk’, and two scenes of rape. One of these shows no soldiers; it is more in the bandit mode. The other is labelled ‘Women attacked by soldiers’, but in truth it is very hard to tell whether the assailants are soldiers or not. It is certainly true that the style in which the figures are painted is strongly reminiscent of the Disasters and has been placed in 1810; on the other hand the pattern of light and dark is equally strongly reminiscent of the earlier ‘bandit’ series. The muscular realism of the modelling of the figures is that of the paintings of Friar Pedro capturing the bandit Maragato of 1806-7, which no less anticipates the manner of the Disasters [53]. Moreover the figure of the woman being carried off in ‘Women attacked by soldiers’, while anticipating a famine scene from the late series of Disasters plates, is also very reminiscent of one of the drawings Goya made, before 1808, after Flaxman’s illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy . 4
It is possible to overemphasize the war as an agent of change in Goya’s work. In truth he was painting and drawing ‘disasters’ long before war broke out. All these paintings of violence which are difficult to place belong to a dark hinterland common to both the Disasters and the Caprichos. They are developments of the perspective he achieved in the 1790s, working through the ‘bandit’ scenes and the Maragato paintings. The Disasters represent a logical extension of this exploration.
One painting done before 1812 which does register on the mind is the enigmatic Colossus [55]. A towering giant with clenched fist looms over a horizon and behind his back, in the foreground, men and beasts flee in wild disorder. Its symbolism has been discussed at length. It seems to symbolize war itself. With its thick slabs of paint floating on a background that is almost black, it anticipates the Black Paintings.
Certainly, the earlier plates in the Disasters series could be considered an expression of such an outlook. By and large they concentrate on victims. There is not a trace of
conventional patriotism in them. Moreover, at about the same time Goya executed a series of still-lifes of dead fish, birds, game, several of which bear a strong resemblance to the still-lifes of dead human bodies in the early Disasters. 5 The impression is strong that in the earlier plates of the Disasters Goya was conducting an exercise, making another capricho. There is no evidence that he was a witness of his scenes; his uniforms are often indeterminate. On two prints and two prints only (and they relatively ‘harmless’ scenes of flight) does he write ‘This I saw’. The war of course made more elemental and direct the kind of vision he had been cultivating since 1793; the pity and the horror are there.
But in essence, he built on his exploration of violence and realism which had grown through the personal paintings from the 1790s and the Maragato series, built it up and incorporated it in a new capricho, much as he incorporated references to 1808 in his black-border drawings in Album E.
In the second series of Disasters plates there is some change. The famine is their major subject, but in the war plates there is a frenzy of stomach-churning atrocity, largely French, and an emphasis on Spanish initiative, particularly by ferocious and heroic women. A touch of populist patriotism enters.
These were made through and after the famine of 1811-12, possibly at the time of the liberation of Madrid.
It is about this time that his association with Leocadia Weiss, who was to become such a fierce exaltado , probably began. In the same period his realist genre paintings reach something of a climax. He returned to some of the themes of the Caprichos and re-worked them in his new breadth and vigour. The result was the series Majas on a Balcony, Maja and Celestina, Time and the Old Women, and Young Women with a letter (in which Leocadia may figure) - some of his most effective work. More striking, he produced what was evidently meant to be a series of working men and women. Three survive, two done before 1812, one after it. These three, the Water-Carrier, the Knife-Grinder and the Forge, represent a moment in the history of modern European painting. Far more than in the paintings of the French Revolution, far more than in David’s Maraichiere, here the proletarian assumes full stature. And what a stature it is!
In these paintings, three of Goya’s masterpieces, he becomes monumental [50,51,52].
For whatever reason, the famine, Leocadia, his flight to Piedrahita, a new and different perception of the pueblo finds expression in Goya’s work. It carries the work he had been
doing on violence, realism, capricho since the 1790s to a new plane and informs the changed tone of his later war and famine Disasters plates. This thrust of personal creativity ran into confluence with his public performance as a politique.
For at this time, Madrid was liberated and the French expelled. Goya had to re-establish himself. This, then, was the root and source of his superb achievement in the Third of May.
With this achievement, he thought of publishing a new set of caprichos on the experiences of the war and began to group the plates in series. The restoration of Ferdinand and the victory of the serviles put a stop to that. Struggling out of the
67. Christ on the Mount of Olives, 1819
purification process and producing his portraits during 1815, he abandoned the war series, bought a new set of large plates and engraved the Tauromaquia. Originally conceived as illustration to Moratin senior’s history of bullfighting, the sequence became a work in its own right, clever and accomplished. It was published in 1816 but was not a success. 6
So Goya withdrew into a private world. In 1819 he withdrew from Madrid itself, into the Quinta del Sordo. The only serious forays outside were to churches, on commission.
And interestingly enough, it is at this point that his religious paintings acquire an intensity which is rare (it is not religious feeling that gives the San Antonio Florida frescoes their power). Visible in the grisaille he did for the royal palace in
1817, it is vivid in the Last Communion of St Joseph of Calasanz of 1819, which he painted for the Escuelas Pias de San Anton, the religious order which had taught him as a child in Saragossa. Less finished but perhaps even more moving was the Christ on the Mount of Olives which he gave the teaching fathers as a gift: a haggard and human Christ, a Disasters Christ, face upturned and arms outstretched, bent to the light [67].
This figure, which recurs constantly in Goya’s work in these years from the Crucifixion motif in the Third of May and some of the execution scenes of his war engravings, sets the tone [68, 69]. It re-appears in the Gethsemane of the prisoners in his drawings. For these are the years of the
68. (Opposite) Divine Liberty, drawing Cl 15, n.d.
69. (Above) Sad forebodings of what is to come. Desastres , 1, c.1820
70. Feminine Folly. Disparates 1, c. 1815-24
powerful drawings of Albums C and F; the crucifixion of hope, the numbness of despair, the frustration of rage. Through them runs a sense of betrayal grounded in a deepening, darkening, but still often wryly humorous familiarity with men and women. To judge from the quality of much of his work at this time, the humour, black though it often was, was a barrier against madness.
In essence, Goya at this time returned to that dialectic of reason and unreason which he had first explored in the Caprichos of 1799, the tension which had destroyed his friends the ilustrados , which the reign of Ferdinand made poignant. By this time his comprehension of it had been immeasurably enriched and it could not be kept locked within himself. So, almost simultaneously, he launched on two major enterprises in engraving, shortly to be followed by a third, in painting.
He began a new series of engravings as a blistering commentary on the Restoration of Ferdinand VII. Monsters and witches in the style of the Caprichos point the satire.
And on the same set of plates as he had used for Tauromaquia (the series in fact overlapped) he began on the Disparates.
The Disparates are perhaps the most impenetrable of his
71. Disorderly Folly. Disparates 7, c. 1815-24
works. 7 Goya seems to have cultivated a vision which is incommunicable. He worked hard on the preparatory drawings, often altered them considerably to clarify, or possibly to obscure the design. He wrote titles on the many proofs he made; these always included the word Disparate , folly or absurdity, but not used in any hectoring sense. When eighteen of the twenty-two known plates passed to the Academy along with the Disasters in 1863, the institution gave them the title Proverbs. Tomas Harris suggested suitable proverbs to fit them all, but few seem very convincing. 8
Some of the earlier plates echo the Tauromaquia and the war drawings. In Fools’ Folly, for example, the bulls of the Tauromaquia go flying through the air, and the soldiers frightened by a phantom recall the war. The latter, however, also recalls the Caprichos. In fact through these Follies flit memories and allusions to almost every stage of his career right back to the tapestry cartoons - the Manikin is tossed again in Feminine Folly but in curiously distorted form [70]. Disorderly Folly, in which a Siamese twin of a couple resembles one of the Caprichos on marriage, also confronts them with a misshapen and twisted crowd straight out of the Black Paintings [71].
72. Simpleton’s Folly. Disparates 4, c. 1815-24
There are clearly elements of satire. A huge giant clicking his castanets over two cowering figures originally clicked them in the preliminary drawing over a priest half-embracing, half-hiding behind a nun [72]. Animal Folly in which an elephant confronts tiny figures trying to read the laws at him has been construed as a political satire on the People and Power. 9 But, in truth, they are difficult to decipher, possibly because the series was never finished. They are crowded with ‘memories’ and quotations of his earlier work, but what loom largest of all are clearly the Caprichos of 1799. On the large Tauromaquia plates the difference in scale is striking. There is a feeling of limitless space, and with the reduction in the number of figures the engravings become monumental. But it is the Caprichos that the Disparates ‘quote’, though in a style which, in parallel to the last plates of the Disasters , anticipates the Black Paintings. It is the mood that matters; and to the reader, the mood hovers uncertainly — and characteristically — between terror and black comedy.
The Black Paintings themselves almost certainly followed Goya’s illness. For, as the middle-class conspiracy against Ferdinand crumbled in 1819, Goya in his isolated house fell seriously ill and came near to death. As he recovered in 1820,
he set about covering the walls of his house with paintings which are quite horrifying in their intensity and breathtaking in their genius. He painted in oils straight on to the plaster, filling up the space between doors and windows, sometimes six metres square, probably dashing them on to the walls in a burst of violent inspiration.
They are a nightmare. Hideous distorted faces and figures, the devil-goat, parodies of religious romerias and processions, remote, cold Fates and alein humans fill the picture. They are infinitely disturbing in a way one cannot quite understand. There is nothing quite like them. Endless attempts to ‘explain’ these paintings have run into endless failure.
At the entrance to the ground floor of the house stood one painting distinct from the others: it is not horrifying. A young and graceful woman, in black, leans against what appears to be a tomb. Across the way from it are two skeletal portraits of old men. This confrontation of age and youth is certainly one element. One painting shows two young people laughing at an old man masturbating.
Pierre Gassier suggests one interpretation that seems plausible. 10 On his return to life from the brink of death, Goya painted a ‘testament’. The young woman, the first painting to be seen on entering the room, is Leocadia, his ‘widow’; beyond this real scene, the other paintings represent a horrific vision of a descent into hell. Next to Leocadia, a huge black goat, the Devil, confronts a hideous crowd of acolytes while an elegant young woman with a muff sits spectator in a chair (Leocadia again?). Opposite, a terrifying Saturn devours his sons, and Judith is at her slaughter.
Many of the other paintings upstairs are distorted echoes from the past. The grotesque Pilgrimage of San Isidro parodies the tapestry cartoons [73]. In Asmodea the soldiers of the Disasters fire at demons; the Fates brood in a chill and ugly silence. Two men fight with clubs unaware that they are both sinking to their deaths in quicksand. In quicksand, too, sinks an utterly enigmatic dog, his pathetic and appealing head snouting upwards towards a damaged area where there was once, apparently, a huge demon head ( tragala, perro?).
Whether they are a vision of death and hell or not, the paintings are terrifying, haunting and profoundly disturbing. They would surely suggest madness (they do to some) were it not for the fact that at the very time when he was hurling these paintings on his walls, Goya was drawing the joyful symbols of welcome to the Revolution of 1820 and crowing
over the discomfiture of the clericals. In France his work was to be immensely sane, often happy and essentially peaceful. 11
It is the Disparates and the Black Paintings which create the climate in which Goya finished the Disasters of War. 12 He engraved a series of plates in this climate, bunched them at the end of his war and famine scenes, and consciously inserted several of them into earlier sequences in what was obviously a carefully constructed plan. It cannot be said that he succeeded. To readers remote from Goya’s time, the last prints seem too distinct in style; attention rivets on the ‘horrors of war’, the enigmatic prints of the later period seem
73. The romeria of San Isidro, c. 1820-23 (black paintings)
an appendix, a matter for scholarly exegesis. This was certainly not what Goya intended. For what he intended to do was to carry the capricho begun in 1810 to its conclusion, to complete it. In a very real sense, the Disparates and even the Black Paintings are a fulfilment of the Caprichos of 1799. The last plates of the Disasters certainly are. The perspective in which Goya conceived his series was the perspective not of the war but of the Restoration , in which the dialectic of reason and unreason of the original Caprichos had become unbearable.
It is this which gives their full, intolerable power to the Disasters of War.
74. Nothing. That’s what it says. Desastres, 69, c.1820
(The Academy altered the caption to: Nothing. Time will tell.)
