Goya and the Peninsular War

To an official court painter we owe the most harrowing records of the effects of revolution and war. W.R. Jeudwine discusses Goya and his times.

In 1808 Goya was sixty-two. For the past nine years he had been official court painter to Charles IV, and his reputation was firmly established as the foremost artist in Spain. The self-portrait etched as a frontispiece to Los Caprichos shows what he looked like around 1800. It is a strong face, reminding one a little of Oliver Cromwell, and it suggests a big and powerful man. There is a certain self-consciousness which makes it very much a portrait of “the master.” The mouth has a touch of arrogance, and in the sideways glance of the eyes is a hint of the satirical shrewdness that produced the merciless portrait of Queen Maria Luisa now in the gallery at Munich. Here, one would have said, is a man brimming with self-confidence and swagger, a likely hero for the legendary escapades of his youth. He is supposed, for example, to have fled from his home-town of Saragossa after leading a brawl between rival church factions; to have been involved in the political riots at Madrid in 1766, and to have been imprisoned in Rome for climbing at night into a convent in pursuit of a nun.

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