DOI Heft:
No. 105 (December, 1901)
DOI Artikel:Bensusan, S. L.: A note upon the paintings of Francisco José Goya
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.19874#0173
Goya
Church whose representatives he hated so heartily.
Whatever his task, he performed it with a courage
that compels our admiration for a man whose life
was in all respects irregular.
Perhaps the devotion to his country proved fatal
to Goya. Had he followed Charles IV. into exile,
and returned with Ferdinand to Madrid, we should
have lost the series of etchings known as Desestras
de la Guerra, but the painter would perhaps have
retained his reason. One cannot avoid the belief
that the sights he saw around him were too great
for a brain that responded so readily to every
impression. He found despair and desolation on
all sides; his friends had left him—they were dead or
exiled; he was afflicted with deafness complete and
incurable, and old age was pursuing him. What
Goya saw and felt he expressed with all his might,
and in the latter years of his life in Spain he saw
Horror personified stalking through the land he had
known best in times of peace and plenty. He had
expressed the worst side of life before—witness his
Interior of a Madhouse* and two pictures repro-
duced here, A Coach Attacked by Bandits,\
and The Plague Hospital, from the collection
of a nobleman^: who has several remarkable
specimens of the painter's work. But in the
latter years we find a greater concentration upon
the worst side of everything, ceasing only when
he had left Spain and taken up his residence
* Academy San Fernando. t Collection of Duke de Montellano.
% The Marquis de Romana.
in Bordeaux, where he became once more a
painter of portraits and executed the famous
lithographs dealing with bull-fighting which had
been the subject of the thirty odd etchings of
the " Tauromachia " series.
Whatever may be thought of Goya's many-
sided genius, the fact remains that he has
exercised an immense influence upon modern
art. He freed it from binding conventions that
made men the slaves of schools rather than
the independent interpreters of life, and France
hailed him with an enthusiasm of which we find
traces in the works of Henri Regnault, while
Manet borrows from Goya his treatment of crowds
and his handling of portraits.
Goya's influence is strong in Whistler and upon
many younger men who have been influenced
by Velasquez through Goya. Whether his active
influence is at an end with Manet and Whistler,
or is destined to impress itself still further upon
the history of modern art, is a question upon which
few artists seem disposed to agree. Goya remains
the last as well as one of the greatest artists of
Spain, the interpreter of times, manners, customs
and thoughts that survive only in the work of
his hands. S. L. Bensusan.
The illustrations in the above article were re-
produced from photographs by Messrs. Romo &
Fiissel of Madrid.
"THE PLAGUE HOSPITAL"
(In the Collection o f the Marquis de Romana)
160
Church whose representatives he hated so heartily.
Whatever his task, he performed it with a courage
that compels our admiration for a man whose life
was in all respects irregular.
Perhaps the devotion to his country proved fatal
to Goya. Had he followed Charles IV. into exile,
and returned with Ferdinand to Madrid, we should
have lost the series of etchings known as Desestras
de la Guerra, but the painter would perhaps have
retained his reason. One cannot avoid the belief
that the sights he saw around him were too great
for a brain that responded so readily to every
impression. He found despair and desolation on
all sides; his friends had left him—they were dead or
exiled; he was afflicted with deafness complete and
incurable, and old age was pursuing him. What
Goya saw and felt he expressed with all his might,
and in the latter years of his life in Spain he saw
Horror personified stalking through the land he had
known best in times of peace and plenty. He had
expressed the worst side of life before—witness his
Interior of a Madhouse* and two pictures repro-
duced here, A Coach Attacked by Bandits,\
and The Plague Hospital, from the collection
of a nobleman^: who has several remarkable
specimens of the painter's work. But in the
latter years we find a greater concentration upon
the worst side of everything, ceasing only when
he had left Spain and taken up his residence
* Academy San Fernando. t Collection of Duke de Montellano.
% The Marquis de Romana.
in Bordeaux, where he became once more a
painter of portraits and executed the famous
lithographs dealing with bull-fighting which had
been the subject of the thirty odd etchings of
the " Tauromachia " series.
Whatever may be thought of Goya's many-
sided genius, the fact remains that he has
exercised an immense influence upon modern
art. He freed it from binding conventions that
made men the slaves of schools rather than
the independent interpreters of life, and France
hailed him with an enthusiasm of which we find
traces in the works of Henri Regnault, while
Manet borrows from Goya his treatment of crowds
and his handling of portraits.
Goya's influence is strong in Whistler and upon
many younger men who have been influenced
by Velasquez through Goya. Whether his active
influence is at an end with Manet and Whistler,
or is destined to impress itself still further upon
the history of modern art, is a question upon which
few artists seem disposed to agree. Goya remains
the last as well as one of the greatest artists of
Spain, the interpreter of times, manners, customs
and thoughts that survive only in the work of
his hands. S. L. Bensusan.
The illustrations in the above article were re-
produced from photographs by Messrs. Romo &
Fiissel of Madrid.
"THE PLAGUE HOSPITAL"
(In the Collection o f the Marquis de Romana)
160