Goya [antikvár]

Goya The greatness of Goya is more widely aclinowledged today than ever before. He is known and appreciated everywhere as a portrait painter, as a creator of menacing and melancholy images in oils, as a master of enigmatic, satirical and revolutionary drawing and engraving, as the champion of the Spanish people in their struggle against oppression, and the recorder of their life and customs and their sufferings in war. Today every major collection in the world possesses some of his 292 engravings. These were published from Goya's own plates in successive editions, the most recent being issued in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. These engravings are, of course, the most portable of Goya's works and therefore, in the physical sense, the most accessible. To judge his achievement as a painter, however, one must still go to Spain. Most of the chief galleries of Europe and the Americas contain, to be sure, examples of his painting, and some of these represent him at his best and most characteristic. But of approximately 500 works with any title to authenticity, nearly a third are in Madrid and almost half are preserved in Spain. No gallery outside Spain possesses more than a dozen. Though Goya was in his lifetime the foremost painter in Spain, his fame in this medium did not extend to the rest of Europe. His only foreign patrons appear to have been the Duke of Wellington and the few Frenchmen who sat to him for their portraits - and most of these portraits were painted in Spain. He was little known abroad except as the author of his series of etchings, Los Caprichos. Even in Spain his reputation was in eclipse before he died. In 1828, the year of Goya's death, the catalogue of the Museo del Prado in Madrid, for which he himself had provided the autobiographical note, contained only three of his canvases: the equestrian portraits of Charles IV and his Queen and one other. Today the Prado possesses some 130 pictures. He had little or no immediate influence in his own country and when he retired at the age of 80 as First Court Painter (Primer Pintor de Cámara) he was succeeded, not by a pupil or follower, but by an exponent of the neo-classical style, Vicente López. Goya moved to France in the last years of his life but this did not, apparently, make him better known in Europe. The first signs of his European reputation came after his death, among the new generation of French Romantics, who were admirers, in particular, of Los Caprichos. One of the earliest of these was Delacroix, who made copies of some of them. It was to him that the first monograph on Goya, published in Paris by Laurent Matheron, was dedicated in 1858. Before Matheron, writers such as Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire had done much to make Goya's name known as a painter as well as an engraver, and the growth of hispanisme at that time, together with the publication in the 1860s of the Desastres !!e la Guerra (The Disasters of War) and the Proverbios (Proverbs) combined to make his influence more widespread. The generations of artists who succeeded Delacroix