Francisco de Goya

Francisco Goya (b.1746-d.1828) was Spanish painter whose drawings and engravings reflected contemporary historical upheavals and influenced important 19th- and 20th century painters.

He was born n Fuendetodos, a village in northern Spain. His family later moved to Saragossa, where Goya's father worked as a gilder. At about age of 14 Goya found employment under the mediocre artist Jose Luzan. At the age of 17 he went to Madrid. His style was influenced by two painters who were working there- Tiepolo and Antonio Raphael Mengs. In 1763 he entered a competition at the Royal Academy of San Fernando, and failed, as he did in the year 1766. In 1770, he want to Rome and survived by living off his works of art. On returning to Saragossa in 1771, he painted frescoes for the local cathedral. These works, done in the decorative rococo tradition, established Goya's artistic reputation. In 1773 he married Josefa Bayeu, sister of artist Francisco Bayeu. The couple had many children, but only one survived to adulthood.

From 1775 to 1792 Goya painted designs for the royal tapestry factory in Madrid. This was the most important period in his artistic development. As a tapestry designer, Goya did his first genre paintings, or scenes from everyday life. At the same time, Goya achieved his first popular success. He became established as a portrait painter to the Spanish aristocracy. He was elected to the Royal Academy of San Fernando in 1780, named painter to the king in 1786, and made a court painter in 1789. After contracting cholera and a high fever in 1792, Goya was left deaf, and he became withdrawn and introspective. Isolated from others by his deafness, he became increasingly occupied with the fantasies and inventions of his imagination and with critical and satirical observations of mankind. In 1799 he published the Caprichos, a series of etchings satirizing human folly and weakness.

Goya served as director of painting at the Royal Academy from 1795 to 1797 and was appointed first Spanish court painter in 1799. During the Napoleonic invasion and the Spanish war of independence from 1808 to 1814, Goya served as court painter to the French. He expressed his horror of armed conflict in The Disasters of War, a series of starkly realistic etchings on the atrocities of war. In 1816 he published his etchings on bullfighting, called the Tauromaquia. From 1819 to 1824 Goya lived in seclusion in a house outside Madrid.

Goya left Spain in May 1824 for Bordeaux, where he settled. He returned to Spain in 1826, but, despite a warm welcome, he returned in ill health to Bordeaux, where he died in 1828.