GOYA y LUCIENTES Francisco
(Fuendetodos – Zaragozza 1746 – Bordeaux 1828)
Fourth of six brothers, Francisco was born in a village near Zaragoza, in a small bourgeois family. His father José was a goldsmith master, while his mother Gracia Lucientes was a “Hidalga”, i.e. belonging to the lowest level of Spanish nobility. With his family he moved to Zaragoza in 1759 where his father hoped to improve his financial conditions.
Francisco received a brief school education, but since the age of fourteen, he became an apprentice in the studio of painter José Luzán y Martínez, where he studied drawing technique and where he met Francisco Bayeu (a Luzan’s pupil too), with whom he had a long lasting friendship. In 1763 he moved to Madrid where he unsuccessfully participated in two competitions for a scholarship at the Academy of Fine Arts of San Ferdinando.
At the same time, he worked for his friend Francisco Bayeu, who had been appointed as a court painter. In order to improve his professional persona, he embarked on a trip to Italy to learn the works of the classics and the Renaissance masters.
In Parma he participated in a competition and, despite he didn’t win, he obteined a special mention. In 1771, strengthened by the new artistic status derived from the Italian experience, he returned to Spain where he obtained his first official commission for frescoes of Nuestra Señora del Pilar in Zaragoza.
In 1773, Goya married Josefa Bayeu, sister of her friend Francisco. In 1775, in Madrid, Goya received the task of drawing sketchs for tapestries at the Real Fábrica de Tapices de Santa Bárbara. Furthermore, he obtained other commissions for both the cartons and paintings for the decoration of the royal residences. With the 1778 publication of 11 prints taken from Velasquez’s paintings, his etching production began.
In the 80s of the 18th century, his situation became more prosperous and grew his fame thanks to the protection of the Duke of Osuna, who appreciated his artistic skills, and for whom Goya painted portraits and pictures for the Palace Alameda. In addition to the public’s favour, he had also the royal one and eventually in 1786 he was named first court painter.
In 1793, after a serious illness, he remained completely deaf, which has led the artist to devote himself more intensely to etching for reasons of meditation, isolation and loneliness. He gave rise to the wonderful Los Caprichos series, eighty etching and aquatint tables published for the first time in 1799. Los Caprichos are a pungent satire on man’s sins, ignorance and popular superstition, but also on the Church, aristocracy and monarchy, expressions of unjust and often corrupt power. Through an universal valuable deep reflection he denounces the evils of the society of his time with the force of a violent expression and sarcastic caricature of his etchings.
Between 1810 and 1820 he performed the series of Disasters of War with which he denounces the horrors of war, the ignorance in which people are maintained and the oppression of the dominant class.
Around 1815 he completed the thirty-three etchings of Tauromachia and between 1816 and 1823 the twenty-two copper-plates of the Disparates series (known as the Proverbs), his last great series of etchings. In 1819, with the restoration of the Bourbon regime in Spain, Goya moved to the outskirts of Madrid on the banks of the Manzanarre.
Here, from 1820 to 1823, he dedicated himself to the so-called black paintings made on a wall inside his home. One of the greatest merits of Goya, transitional figure between the old and the modern graphics, was to hand down a true testimony of scarce virtues and many defects of the society of his time.
He died in Bordeaux in 1828 after a stroke at the age of 82.
In 1919, his remains were transferred to the Royal Chapel of St. Anthony of La Florida, Madrid.
