Francisco Goya

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes was a Spanish painter and printmaker whose career ran from the courtly world of Bourbon Spain in the late 18th century to the upheavals of the Napoleonic wars and their aftermath. Having risen from tapestry designer to the leading painter at the royal court, he turned in his prints and private paintings to war, cruelty and superstition. He is often seen as both the final Old Master and the first modern painter.

Goya was born on 30 March 1746 in the village of Fuendetodos in Aragon to a gilder's family that soon returned to Zaragoza. From the age of 14 he trained there with the painter José Luzán. He then went to Madrid to study under Anton Raphael Mengs, but the Royal Academy of San Fernando rejected him in 1763 and 1766.

Next he paid his own way to Rome, a stay about which little is reliably known. In 1771 he took second prize in a competition held in Parma and returned to Zaragoza to paint frescoes, including in the basilica of the Pillar. In July 1773 he married Josefa, sister of the painter Francisco Bayeu. Of their seven children, only one son, Javier, lived to adulthood.

Bayeu's influence helped Goya win commissions from the Royal Tapestry Factory in Madrid, for which he designed some 42 patterns over five years, lively Rococo scenes for royal palaces such as El Escorial. Portrait commissions from ministers and nobles followed. In 1786 he received a salaried post as a painter to Charles III, and in 1789 he was made court painter to the new king, Charles IV.

His royal portraits were notably unflattering. The group portrait Charles IV of Spain and His Family, painted in 1800–01, places the queen at the centre, and many modern viewers read it as a quiet comment on a weak and corrupt court. His Naked Maja, probably made for the chief minister Manuel Godoy, was an unusually frank nude for the period and was later seized by the Inquisition.

Between late 1792 and early 1793 an illness that has never been firmly identified left Goya permanently deaf. In 1799 he published the Caprichos, 80 etchings that mocked the vices and superstitions of Spanish society, among them the famous plate The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. That same year he became First Court Painter, the highest rank open to a painter in Spain.

In 1808 French forces under Napoleon occupied Spain, beginning the Peninsular War. Goya stayed in Madrid and avoided taking sides in public. In 1814 he painted The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808, showing the Madrid rising and the executions that followed. In the same years he worked on the etchings later called The Disasters of War, which record killings, the Madrid famine of 1811–12 and the disappointment of liberals when the restored King Ferdinand VII abandoned the constitution of 1812. They appeared only in 1863.

From the late 1810s Goya lived largely alone in a farmhouse outside Madrid known as the Quinta del Sordo, the House of the Deaf Man. Between about 1819 and 1823 he painted 14 nightmarish scenes in oil straight onto its plaster walls, works now known as the Black Paintings and today in the Prado. In 1824, disillusioned with the restored monarchy, he left Spain for Bordeaux in France, accompanied by his companion Leocadia Weiss. He died in Bordeaux on 16 April 1828, aged 82, after a stroke. In 1919 his remains were reburied in Madrid.

Goya's prints showed how images could protest against violence and injustice. Painters such as Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí drew on the Caprichos and the Black Paintings.

Our 1800 map shows the Spanish Empire at the height of Goya's court career, while the 1815 map shows Spain and its neighbours just after the defeat of the First French Empire, whose invasion shaped his most powerful work.