Francisco de Goya: Life, Works and a Modern Vision
Goya could paint the silk of a royal gown and the white of a shirt moments before a firing squad opened fire. He knew courtly smiles, faces twisted by fear, donkeys dressed as men and gods devouring their children.
That range explains why he is so often placed at the threshold between two worlds. He was a painter to the king and a witness to the violence of his age, an heir to Velázquez and a precursor of Manet, a satirical printmaker and the creator of private images whose darkness still seems wet.
In brief: Francisco de Goya was born in Fuendetodos, Aragon, in 1746 and died in Bordeaux in 1828. He became a court painter in Spain and produced tapestry cartoons, aristocratic portraits, religious paintings and major historical scenes. A serious illness left him deaf in the early 1790s. His print series—Los Caprichos, The Disasters of War, Tauromaquia and Los Disparates—examined superstition, violence and power. His Black Paintings made him a major forerunner of modern art.
Francisco de Goya: key dates
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1746 | born in Fuendetodos, near Zaragoza |
| 1760s | trains in Zaragoza, then travels to Italy |
| 1775 | begins making cartoons for the Royal Tapestry Factory |
| 1780 | admitted to the Royal Academy of San Fernando |
| 1789 | appointed court painter to the king |
| 1792–1793 | serious illness followed by permanent deafness |
| 1799 | publishes the eighty prints of Los Caprichos |
| 1808 | Napoleonic invasion and the Peninsular War |
| 1814 | paints The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808 |
| c. 1819–1823 | creates the Black Paintings at the Quinta del Sordo |
| 1824 | settles in Bordeaux |
| 1828 | dies in Bordeaux |
Training between Zaragoza, Madrid and Italy
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was born on 30 March 1746. His father was a gilder, a profession that brought the young artist close to altarpieces, frames and religious commissions in which several crafts worked together.
He trained in Zaragoza under José Luzán. His first attempts to win a prize at the San Fernando Academy were unsuccessful—a consoling detail for anyone who imagines that every major career begins with an overwhelmed jury.
Goya travelled in Italy around 1769–1771, studied the masters and entered a competition in Parma. Back in Aragon, he received religious commissions, notably for the Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar.
His marriage to Josefa Bayeu in 1773 brought him closer to a family of painters with strong court connections. His brother-in-law Francisco Bayeu played an important part in his entry into the royal workshops.
The tapestry cartoons: learning to bring a scene to life
From 1775, Goya designed cartoons that served as full-scale guides for tapestries intended for royal residences.
Here, “cartoon” does not mean a casual or disposable sketch. These were large paintings conceived to be translated into wool and silk.
Goya depicted popular pastimes and social types: picnics, blind man’s buff, dancing, a parasol, street vendors and children. The colours are bright, the silhouettes legible and the compositions adapted to the demands of weaving.
Yet the scenes are not merely pleasant. In The Injured Mason and The Snowstorm, labour, cold and vulnerability enter the princely setting.
This period taught him how to organise a group, carry a gesture through a composition and make a subject immediately clear. His darker works would retain that efficiency.
Goya as court painter: flattering without putting the eye to sleep
Goya became a painter to King Charles III and later a court painter under Charles IV. He portrayed the royal family, aristocrats, intellectuals and friends.
His portraits describe materials superbly: ribbons, velvet, lace, decorations and powdered hair. Yet their faces do not dissolve into flattery.
In The Family of Charles IV, the sovereigns and their relatives occupy the space like actors on a stage. Their fabrics gleam, but each face retains an individuality that is not always idealised. Goya placed himself in the background before a large canvas, in a clear echo of Velázquez’s Las Meninas.
The painting therefore performs several tasks at once:
- asserting dynastic continuity;
- displaying signs of rank;
- demonstrating the painter’s mastery;
- recording presences precise enough to resist protocol.
Goya was not secretly caricaturing the entire court. Tempting though that reading is, it simplifies a complex professional relationship. He could serve power and retain an independent eye without turning every royal chin into coded satire.
Illness and deafness
At the end of 1792, Goya became seriously ill while travelling in Andalusia. He experienced severe symptoms and was left permanently deaf.
The exact nature of the illness remains disputed. Several diagnoses have been proposed, but none can be established with retrospective certainty. Saying “he had this disease” may sound clearer than the archives, but it is less accurate.
Deafness changed his social life and the way he communicated. It also coincided with a deepening interest in drawings, small paintings and prints.
We should nevertheless avoid the convenient story in which illness single-handedly “explains” every dark turn. Goya lived amid the tensions of Enlightenment Spain, the Inquisition, political upheaval and, soon, war. His imagination was not a symptom.
Los Caprichos: when satire meets nightmare
In 1799, Goya offered for sale a series of eighty prints entitled Los Caprichos. Etching and aquatint allowed him to combine lines, dark masses and velvety tonal effects.
The series attacks or exposes:
- marriages of convenience;
- ignorance and superstition;
- prostitution and exploitation;
- social vanity;
- abuses in the clergy and education;
- reversals in which donkeys govern people.
The short captions do not close down meaning. They act like needles.
Plate 43 shows an artist asleep at his table, surrounded by owls, bats and other creatures. Its title has become a universal phrase:
“The sleep of reason produces monsters.” — Francisco de Goya, Los Caprichos, plate 43, Museo del Prado
The phrase does not necessarily argue that reason should suppress imagination. Historical commentaries instead suggest that the two must work together: without reason, fantasy becomes monstrous; without imagination, art dies.
The clothed and naked Majas: gaze, model and prohibition
The Naked Maja and The Clothed Maja probably show the same model in almost the same pose. The woman’s identity has never been established with certainty.
The nude is not disguised as a mythological Venus. The model looks directly at the viewer, her arms behind her head. That frankness partly explains the work’s scandalous character in the Spain of its time.
The paintings belonged to Manuel Godoy, the powerful minister of Charles IV. They were seized and examined by the Inquisition, and Goya was questioned.
The pair forces us to compare the clothed and naked body without deciding that one must be the truth concealed by the other. Clothing does more than cover: it changes the surface, the colour and the nature of the gaze.
The Peninsular War: no clean victory
In 1808, Napoleon’s troops occupied Spain. The Madrid uprising of 2 May was suppressed. The ensuing war brought armies, guerrilla fighting, famine, reprisals and political crisis together.
Goya lived through this period in a difficult position. He continued to work under successive powers and was later questioned about his relations with the regime of Joseph Bonaparte.
Yet his most powerful images reject the reassuring account of a clean, heroic war.
The Second of May 1808
The painting shows street fighting in Madrid against the Mamelukes of the Imperial Guard. Bodies, horses, sabres and gazes form a knot with no stable centre.
The violence is not framed as a parade. It erupts at the level of the figures.
The Third of May 1808
In The Third of May 1808, a group of French soldiers is seen from behind, aligned like a machine. Opposite them, a man in a white shirt raises his arms. A lantern on the ground illuminates the condemned men and the dead.
The man’s pose evokes a crucifixion without turning the scene into a spiritual victory. Blood, the hidden face of a corpse and the queue of prisoners remind us that the executions will continue.
Realism in painting would emerge later as a movement, but Goya achieved something decisive here: he gave a contemporary event the scale and gravity of grand history painting without idealising it.
The Disasters of War: witnessing without spectacle
Between roughly 1810 and 1820, Goya worked on a series of prints now known as The Disasters of War. They were not published until 1863, long after his death.
The plates show executions, mutilation, famine, rape, flight and abandoned bodies. Their captions are terse: “This is worse”, “Why?”, “One cannot look”, “And this too”.
The images do not always distribute guilt according to simple national propaganda. French and Spanish people, soldiers and civilians can appear as victims or perpetrators. What remains constant is the body subjected to a force that denies it.
Plate 44 bears three words:
“I saw it.” — Francisco de Goya, The Disasters of War, plate 44, The Met
The caption claims the authority of testimony without proving that every scene was directly observed. Goya transformed events experienced, reported and imagined into a broader visual truth: what war does to people.
Saturn Devouring His Son and the Black Paintings
Around 1819, Goya moved into a house near Madrid called the Quinta del Sordo—the “House of the Deaf Man”. The name predated his arrival and therefore did not necessarily refer to him.
He painted fourteen works directly onto its walls. Now known as the Black Paintings, they were not intended for public exhibition.
They include:
- Saturn Devouring His Son;
- Witches’ Sabbath;
- Two Old Men Eating Soup;
- Pilgrimage to the Fountain of San Isidro;
- The Dog;
- Fight with Cudgels.
Saturn shows the god gripping an already mutilated body. His eyes are wide, the background almost empty and the handling abrupt. Unlike more orderly versions of the myth, it offers the viewer almost no shelter in allegorical distance.
The paintings were transferred to canvas in the nineteenth century, an operation that altered their support and may also have affected their appearance. We therefore know them as works removed from the private architecture for which they were made.
The Dog: almost nothing, yet a presence
In The Dog, a small head emerges behind a vast ochre slope. The rest is space.
We do not know exactly what the dog is looking at or what the mass before it represents. The painting has been read as an image of isolation, waiting, drowning or struggle.
Its modernity may lie in its refusal to specify. The subject occupies very little of the surface, and the disproportionate emptiness becomes the principal event.
Goya did not announce twentieth-century abstraction like a prophet holding a calendar. He did, however, show that a composition could be sustained by an almost bare relationship between masses.
Was Goya a Romantic?
He preceded and nourished Romanticism without fitting neatly into a single label.
His historical dramas, visions, freedom of handling and interest in irrational forces appealed to the Romantics. Delacroix admired his prints. Later, Manet, Picasso, the Expressionists and the Surrealists would also find resources in his work.
Calling him the “first modern artist” can help convey his disruptive position, but the label should not erase eighteenth-century Spain, the Enlightenment, the court and the graphic traditions from which he emerged.
Goya is modern precisely because he did not leave his age behind. He looked at it until it became difficult to bear.
His legacy can be felt with particular force in Pablo Picasso, whose Guernica returned to the problem of making historical violence visible without turning it into a conventional heroic scene.
The final years in Bordeaux
In 1824, Goya obtained permission to leave Spain and settled in Bordeaux, home to other liberal exiles.
Despite his age and fragile health, he continued to draw, paint and experiment. He practised lithography and produced the series known as the Bulls of Bordeaux.
He died on 16 April 1828. His remains were later transferred to Madrid and the chapel of San Antonio de la Florida, which he had decorated with frescoes.
His Bordeaux years correct the image of a Goya permanently enclosed in darkness. To the end, he observed streets, bodies, movement and new techniques.
What are Goya’s most famous works?
A good first route through his work might include:
- The Parasol — the tapestry-cartoon period;
- The Family of Charles IV — court portraiture;
- The Naked Maja and The Clothed Maja — gaze and prohibition;
- The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters — Los Caprichos;
- The Second of May 1808 — combat;
- The Third of May 1808 — execution;
- The Disasters of War — violence without heroisation;
- Saturn Devouring His Son — the Black Paintings;
- The Dog — emptiness as a force;
- the self-portraits — the artist’s face across time.
The list reveals a constant: Goya changed medium and audience but retained an acute attention to the ways in which power acts upon bodies.
Frequently asked questions
What is Goya’s best-known work?
The Third of May 1808 in Madrid and Saturn Devouring His Son are among his most famous paintings. The print The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters has also become a universal image.
What illness did Goya have?
Goya suffered a serious illness in 1792–1793 and was left deaf. Several diagnoses have been proposed since his death, but none is certain. It is more accurate to speak of an unidentified illness followed by permanent deafness.
Why is Goya considered modern?
Because he addressed the present without idealising it, explored the irrational, used paint and printmaking freely, criticised institutions and showed violence from the victims’ point of view. His influence runs through Manet, Picasso and Expressionism.
How many paintings did Goya make?
The exact number depends on attribution, lost works and what is included. The Prado preserves or documents more than a thousand works and related records, including paintings, drawings, prints and archives. A definitive total is best avoided.
Was Goya a painter to the king?
Yes. He became a court painter in 1789 and First Court Painter in 1799. That position did not prevent his graphic work from criticising the failings of society.
Where can you see Goya’s works?
The Museo del Prado in Madrid holds the most important collection. Works can also be found at the Real Academia de San Fernando, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art and other international collections. His frescoes at San Antonio de la Florida can be seen in Madrid.
The painter who did not look away
Goya is not only dark. His youthful colours, portraits, crowd drawings and late lithographs contain humour, tenderness and movement.
But he possessed a rare quality: he knew when elegance became a lie. Faced with war, superstition or fear, he removed whatever would make the scene bearable from a distance.
What remains is a lantern on the ground, a white shirt, three words beneath a print or a dog’s head in too much space. Very little. Enough to prevent the viewer from pretending to have seen nothing.
Goya reminds us that a work of art is not defined by its ability to beautify its subject. It can also give lasting form to what an age would rather forget.
Sources and further reading
- Museo Nacional del Prado — Francisco de Goya
- Museo Nacional del Prado — The Third of May 1808
- Museo Nacional del Prado — The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
- Museo Nacional del Prado — Saturn Devouring His Son
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Goya and the Spanish Enlightenment
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Goya’s Graphic Imagination