Goya in Seven Paintings: The Career That Bridged Two Worlds

Francisco Goya was born in 1746 in a small Aragonese village and died in 1828 in exile in Bordeaux. The painter who arrived in Madrid in the early 1770s to design cheerful tapestry cartoons for the royal palace was, fifty years later, the same painter applying the Black Paintings directly to the walls of his country house outside the city. Between those two points sits one of the most consequential careers in European painting. Goya was court painter under four successive Spanish kings (Charles III, Charles IV, Ferdinand VII, and briefly the French puppet king Joseph Bonaparte), the most sought-after portraitist of late-Bourbon Madrid, the publisher of two of the most influential print series in modern art (the Caprichos of 1799 and the Disasters of War produced between 1810 and 1820), a witness to the French invasion of Spain and the partisan war that followed, and the painter who, in his last decade, invented the modern picture of fear. Seven paintings hold the arc of that career together.

Francisco de Goya, Self-Portrait, 1815. Oil on panel, 51 × 46 cm. A Madrid collection. The painter at sixty-nine, deaf since 1793, ten years before the Black Paintings would begin and forty years after the cheerful tapestry cartoons that opened his career. The face is the face of the man whose career bridged the late Enlightenment and the early Romantic age.

1. The Parasol (1777) — the painter as decorator

Goya arrived in Madrid in 1775, aged twenty-nine, and was almost immediately commissioned by the Royal Tapestry Manufactory of Santa Bárbara to produce a series of large oil paintings — known as cartoons — that would serve as templates for tapestry weavings to hang in the royal palaces. Between 1775 and 1791 he produced sixty-three of these cartoons. The most famous, The Parasol (El Quitasol), painted in 1777, shows a young couple at rest on a sunny hillside outside Madrid: a young woman in a silk dress seated on a stone wall, her small dog in her lap, while a young man — a majo, one of the fashionable young men of the Madrid working class — stands behind her holding a green silk parasol that throws a cool circular shadow across her face.

Francisco de Goya, The Parasol (El Quitasol), 1777. Oil on canvas, 104 × 152 cm. A Madrid collection. One of the early tapestry cartoons Goya produced for the Royal Tapestry Manufactory of Santa Bárbara. A majo holds a green silk parasol over a seated young woman on a Madrid hillside — the picture is in every way the opposite of the Black Paintings forty-three years later, and the gap between them is the career.

The Parasol is in every way the opposite of the work Goya would be doing forty years later. The light is clear, the colours are bright (the woman's coral pink jacket against the green parasol shadow), the composition is balanced and decorative, and the subject is everyday upper-bourgeois Madrid leisure as observed by an enlightened painter still committed to the late-Rococo idiom. The picture's purpose was to be woven into a tapestry to hang on a palace wall. It was the work of a painter at the beginning of his career, attempting to please his patrons by being charming.

2. The Family of Charles IV (1800) — court portrait at the peak

Twenty-three years later Goya, now First Painter to the Spanish king, was commissioned by Charles IV to paint the full royal family. The resulting picture, The Family of Charles IV, was completed in 1800 and is two and a half metres tall by three metres wide — one of the largest royal group portraits in eighteenth-century European painting. Thirteen members of the royal family stand in a row across the picture: King Charles IV at the centre right; Queen María Luisa at the centre left, with the two youngest royal children at her sides; the heir apparent (the future Ferdinand VII) at the far left; and the rest of the extended Bourbon family ranged across the picture in a loose horizontal formation. Goya himself appears at the far left back of the picture, half-hidden in shadow, painting at an easel — a deliberate reference to Velázquez's Las Meninas of 1656, which the picture quotes in composition and posture.

Francisco de Goya, The Family of Charles IV (La familia de Carlos IV), 1800. Oil on canvas, 280 × 336 cm. A Madrid collection. The full Spanish royal family ranged across the picture in a Velázquez-style line, with Goya himself half-visible at the far left back, painting at an easel. The picture is the official court portrait at its most ambitious — and, in the slightly unflattering rendering of the queen, slightly subversive.

The picture has long been read in modern criticism as a slightly cruel painting. The queen, María Luisa, is rendered with notable accuracy — her receding hairline, her false teeth (the Spanish court gossip about her vanity was well-known), her over-decorated dress all painted with a portraitist's exactness rather than a courtier's flattery. The king is rendered as vague and slightly absent. The future Ferdinand VII, at the far left, stares directly out at the viewer with a heavy-lidded gaze that later events — Ferdinand's reactionary reign after 1814 — would retrospectively make sinister. The picture was accepted by the royal family without complaint, but it is a notably unillusioned document of the family it portrays. Goya was loyal to the institution and clear-eyed about the individuals.

3. The Naked Maja and The Clothed Maja (c. 1797-1800)

In the same years that Goya was painting the royal family, he was also working on two paired pictures that would create a small scandal twenty-five years later. The two Maja paintings — La Maja Desnuda (The Naked Maja) and La Maja Vestida (The Clothed Maja) — show the same young woman in the same pose, reclining on a green velvet daybed, in two states: nude and dressed. They were painted at approximately life-size (about ninety-five by one hundred and ninety centimetres each) and were owned by Manuel Godoy, the prime minister and the queen's lover, who hung them in his private cabinet behind a pulley device that allowed the clothed picture to slide aside and reveal the nude.

Francisco de Goya, The Naked Maja (La Maja Desnuda), c. 1797-1800. Oil on canvas, 97 × 190 cm. A Madrid collection. The first life-size nude in European painting in which the female figure looks directly out at the viewer without classical or mythological framing — neither a Venus nor a Susannah, just a young woman lying on a daybed and meeting the painter's eye. Owned by Manuel Godoy, who hung it behind the Clothed Maja on a pulley device.

Francisco de Goya, The Clothed Maja (La Maja Vestida), c. 1797-1800. Oil on canvas, 95 × 188 cm. A Madrid collection. The companion picture to The Naked Maja — same model, same pose, same daybed, fully dressed in the white tunic and red sash of the Madrid majo style. The pair were hung together in Godoy's private cabinet with the clothed picture sliding aside to reveal the nude.

The Naked Maja is the first life-size nude in European painting in which the female figure looks directly out at the viewer without classical mythological framing. Earlier reclining nudes — Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538), Velázquez's Rokeby Venus (1647) — had used Venus or Susannah as the mythological alibi that licensed the nudity. Goya's Maja has no alibi. She is simply a young woman lying on a daybed in late-1790s Madrid, meeting the painter's eye. When the Spanish Inquisition discovered the picture in Godoy's cabinet in 1815, Goya was summoned and questioned about it; he refused to name the model and the picture was confiscated, but no further action was taken. The picture and its companion now hang side by side in their original sliding-frame configuration in a Madrid collection.

4. Witches' Sabbath (1798) — the dark turn

Between the Family of Charles IV and the Majas, Goya took on a small private commission for the Duke and Duchess of Osuna: six small oil panels of witchcraft scenes for the cabinet room of their country house at La Alameda. The Witches' Sabbath panel — a circle of older women offering newborn babies to a crowned he-goat under a thin crescent moon — was the moment Goya's painting visibly turned. The Caprichos etchings of the following year (1799) would extend the same project into eighty satirical prints attacking Spanish ignorance, corruption, and folk superstition. The Osuna witch panels and the Caprichos together mark the end of the early decorative phase of Goya's career and the beginning of the painter as observer of the Spanish dark.

Francisco de Goya, Witches' Sabbath (El Aquelarre), 1798. Oil on canvas, 43 × 30 cm. A Madrid collection. One of six small witch panels Goya painted for the Duke and Duchess of Osuna. A circle of women offer newborns to a crowned he-goat by moonlight — the moment Goya's painting decisively turns from decorative court work toward the investigation of fear and superstition that would occupy the rest of his career.

The Osuna witch series and the Caprichos sit at the hinge of the career. Up to 1797 Goya's work could be read as a brilliant late example of the Spanish Rococo and the international Enlightenment portrait tradition. After 1798 the work moves decisively into the territory we now call Romantic — the supernatural and the irrational as legitimate subject matter for serious painting, the human face as a site of pathology rather than of grace, and the painter's job redefined as the recording of conditions earlier painting had treated as either invisible or sacred.

5. The Third of May 1808 — war on the steps

In May 1808 the French army under Napoleon's brother Joseph Bonaparte occupied Madrid. On the second of May the Madrid population rose against the French garrison; on the third of May the French executed several hundred captured Madrid insurgents by firing squad on the slopes of the Príncipe Pío hill outside the city walls. Six years later, in 1814, after Ferdinand VII had returned to the Spanish throne and Goya was being investigated for his apparent collaboration with the French regime, Goya petitioned the new government to be allowed to paint two large pictures commemorating the popular resistance against the French. The two pictures — The Second of May 1808 (showing the Madrid uprising) and The Third of May 1808 (showing the firing-squad executions the following night) — were completed in 1814 and accepted by the king.

Francisco de Goya, The Third of May 1808 (El tres de mayo de 1808), 1814. Oil on canvas, 268 × 347 cm. A Madrid collection. The night-time firing-squad execution of the Madrid insurgents by the French army on the slopes outside the city walls. The central kneeling figure in white shirt, arms raised, has become one of the founding images of modern war painting — every twentieth-century atrocity picture, from Picasso's Guernica to news photographs of contemporary executions, sits in the same composition.

The Third of May 1808 reorganised the iconography of war in European painting. Before Goya, war pictures had been treated as opportunities for heroic composition — Napoleon's official painters under David and Gros had made the French military victory the central decorative subject of European public art for fifteen years. Goya's picture refuses that tradition completely. The French soldiers are anonymous; they are shown from behind, with no faces, their rifles a single horizontal line of metal extending across the right side of the picture. The Spanish victims are the picture's subject. The central kneeling figure in the white shirt, arms raised, has the gesture of a crucified Christ. The lantern on the ground throws an artificial yellow light upward into his face — a light source borrowed directly from Caravaggio's religious paintings. The picture treats a political atrocity with the visual seriousness that earlier European painting had reserved for the Passion. Every modern atrocity picture — Manet's Execution of Maximilian, Picasso's Guernica, the news photographs of twentieth-century executions — sits inside the same compositional framework.

6. The Disasters of War (1810-1820) — the etchings nobody saw

During the French occupation and the partisan war that followed (1808-1814), Goya privately produced a series of eighty-two etchings recording the atrocities committed by all sides — the French soldiers against Spanish civilians, the Spanish guerrillas against captured French troops, and the famine that killed roughly twenty thousand Madrid residents during the winter of 1811-12. The series, known as Los Desastres de la Guerra, was never published in Goya's lifetime; the plates were too politically dangerous under both the French occupation and the restored Bourbon monarchy after 1814. The series circulated privately among Goya's friends and was published in full for the first time in 1863, thirty-five years after Goya's death.

Francisco de Goya, Disasters of War (Los Desastres de la Guerra) plate 37: This is worse (Esto es peor), c. 1810-12. Etching and aquatint, 15.5 × 20.7 cm. The most famous plate in the eighty-two-print series that recorded the French invasion of Spain and the partisan war that followed. The dismembered male corpse impaled on a broken tree was based, according to Goya's notes, on a specific atrocity he had witnessed.

The Disasters are the first sustained body of European war journalism — pictures of specific atrocities, recorded by an eyewitness, with handwritten captions in Goya's own hand that name the events depicted. Plate 37 — Esto es peor ("This is worse") — shows a male corpse impaled on the broken stump of a tree, his head cut off and his arms severed at the shoulder. The caption is not a moralising commentary; it is a comparative observation, implying that the picture before it (plate 36 — Tampoco, "Not these either," showing a man hanging from a tree) was already bad enough, and that this one is worse. The series treats the war as a sequence of empirical events to be recorded, the way a photographer would later record the American Civil War or the Western Front. The whole tradition of modern war photography — Robert Capa, Don McCullin, James Nachtwey — is downstream from this etching series.

7. Saturn Devouring His Son (c. 1820-23) — alone on the wall

In 1819 Goya bought a country house outside Madrid called the Quinta del Sordo. He was seventy-three years old, completely deaf since 1793, and the Bourbon restoration after 1814 had left him politically suspect — he had remained in Madrid through the French occupation, accepted commissions from Joseph Bonaparte's regime, and was now under quiet investigation by Ferdinand VII's police. Between roughly 1820 and 1823, he painted fourteen large compositions directly onto the interior walls of the country house, in oil. The paintings were never shown to anyone outside the house. They were rediscovered in the 1870s and transferred from the original plaster walls to canvas, in a difficult conservation operation that visibly damaged them. They became known after Goya's death as the Black Paintings (Pinturas Negras).

Francisco de Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son, c. 1820-23. Oil mural transferred to canvas, 143.5 × 81.4 cm. A Madrid collection. The most famous of the fourteen Black Paintings Goya applied directly to the interior walls of his country house outside Madrid. The Roman titan Saturn, who eats his own children to prevent the prophecy that they will overthrow him, is here painted with his eyes turned outward at the viewer — caught in the act, and shown as horror rather than as myth.

The Saturn was painted on the wall of the upstairs dining room, directly in front of the table where Goya took his meals. The Roman titan Saturn, who in the myth eats his own children to prevent the prophecy that they will overthrow him, is shown caught in the act — his eyes turned outward toward the viewer in an expression that is no longer mythological. Earlier European treatments of the Saturn subject — Rubens's 1636 painting, the Renaissance allegorical tradition — had handled the myth as a learned classical reference. Goya's Saturn refuses any such distance. The figure is not a classical god behaving classically; it is a half-mad creature in the middle of an act of cannibalism, with no narrative frame around it to give the viewer ironic safety. The picture has become, in modern criticism, the canonical late-Goya image: the final and most extreme statement of the project that began on the small Osuna witch panels in 1798. Painting as a clinical record of human horror, with no protective fictional frame.

Key takeaways

• Francisco Goya (1746-1828) had a fifty-year career that bridged two distinct European worlds — the late Enlightenment Rococo of his early Madrid tapestry cartoons (1775-1791) and the early Romantic age of the Black Paintings (1820-1823) on the walls of his own country house.

• The Parasol (1777) is the canonical example of the early cheerful phase: a couple at rest on a Madrid hillside, painted as a tapestry cartoon for the royal palace, with bright clear colour and balanced decorative composition.

• The Family of Charles IV (1800) is Goya's most ambitious royal commission and a deliberate Velázquez quotation — Goya appears at the back of the picture, painting, as Velázquez had in Las Meninas. The picture is loyal to the institution and notably unillusioned about the individuals.

• The Naked Maja and Clothed Maja (c. 1797-1800) are paired pictures of the same woman in the same pose, owned by Manuel Godoy and hung on a sliding pulley device. The Naked Maja is the first life-size nude in European painting in which the female figure has no classical or mythological alibi.

• The Witches' Sabbath (1798) and the Caprichos etchings (published 1799) mark the hinge of the career. Goya's painting decisively turns from court decoration toward the investigation of fear, ignorance, and the Spanish dark that would occupy the rest of his life.

• The Third of May 1808 (painted 1814) reorganised the iconography of war in European painting: the French soldiers anonymous and faceless, the kneeling Spanish insurgent in the white shirt with arms raised in a crucifixion gesture, the central lantern as a Caravaggesque artificial light. Every modern atrocity picture sits inside this composition.

• The Disasters of War (etched 1810-1820, published 1863) are the first sustained body of European war journalism — eighty-two plates with hand-written captions recording specific atrocities Goya had witnessed during the French invasion of Spain.

• Saturn Devouring His Son (c. 1820-23), one of the fourteen Black Paintings Goya applied to the interior walls of his country house outside Madrid, is the final statement of the project that began in 1798: painting as a clinical record of human horror, with no protective fictional frame, and no audience outside the painter's own dinner table.

Browse Goya, Spanish Romantic, and Black Paintings prints in the archive at zocineartdesign.etsy.com.