Francisco Goya – Spanish 1746-1828

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes
Goya by by Vicente Lopez, 1826
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was an innovative Spanish painter and etcher; one of the triumvirate—including El Greco and Diego Velázquez—of great Spanish masters. Much in the art of Goya is derived from that of Velázquez, just as much in the art of the 19th-century French master Edouard Manet and the 20th-century genius Pablo Picasso is taken from Goya. Trained in a mediocre rococo artistic milieu, Goya transformed this often frivolous style and created works, such as the famous Third of May, 1808 (1814, Museo del Prado, Madrid), that have as great an impact today as when they were created.

A consummately Spanish artist, his multifarious paintings, drawings, and engravings reflected contemporary historical upheavals and influenced important 19th- and 20th-century painters. The series of etchings Los desastres de la guerra ("The Disasters of War", 1810-14) records the horrors of the Napoleonic invasion. For the bold technique of his paintings, the haunting satire of his etchings, and his belief that the artist's vision is more important than tradition, Goya is often called "the first of the moderns." His uncompromising portrayal of his times marks the beginning of 19th-century realism.

He was born in Fuendetodos (Zaragoza), and was apprenticed to Jose Luzan and Francisco Bayeu, whose sister he later married. He went to Italy and upon returning to Spain, he painted frescoes for the local cathedral in Zaragoza, and painted carton (designs) for the royal tapestry factory in Madrid, mostly scenes of everyday life. At the same time, 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 court painter in 1789 (was appointed first Spanish court painter in 1799).

A serious illness in 1792 left Goya permanently deaf and he became increasingly occupied with the fantasies and inventions of his imagination and with critical and satirical observations of mankind. He evolved a bold, free new style close to caricature.

In 1824, after the failure of an attempt to restore liberal government, Goya went into voluntary exile in Bordeaux (France), continuing to work until his death there in 1828.


Search for more Goya items on AMAZON.
Goya by Rose-Marie Hagen, Rainer Hagen – Hardcover: 96 pages; Taschen (Oct 15, 2012)

An artist both of and before his time: The Old Master who ushered in the modern era.

Goya: Black Paintings by Valeriano Bozal – Paperback: 64 pages; Fundación Amigos del Museo del Prado; 2nd edition (1999)

The Spanish master-painter Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) is revered not only for the delicate and sensitive treatment of his subjects but also for his radical political stance and modern sensibility. Towards the end of his life, embittered by the appalling cruelty of the Napoleonic Wars in Spain, Goya decorated the walls of his house outside Madrid with a series of 14 terrifying murals that depicted the underbelly of life and the remorselessness of human existence. Known as the Black Paintings, this series of murals is recognized as one of Goya's greatest masterpieces and now hangs in the Prado. Fully illustrated, this is the only book on the Black Paintings currently in print in English. A controversial narrative gives new interpretations of the artist's intention behind these grotesque works and shows how this period of Goya's work anticipated Surrealism and other aspects of 20th century artistic vision.

Goya: 1746-1828 (Taschen Basic Art) by Rose-Marie Hagen, Rainer Hagen – Paperback: 96 pages; Taschen (Jun 2006)

Francisco Goya (1746-1828) has often been called "the Father of Modern Art." One of Spain's most revered and controversial painters, known for his intense, chilling, sometimes-grotesque images, he portrayed the horrors of war and societies in peril with a power that remains unmatched today. This Spanish-language book samples every major style by this master.

The Black Paintings of Goya by Juan Jose Junquera – Paperback: 96 pages; Scala Publishers (Nov 1, 2003)


Goya by Fred Licht – Hardcover: 360 pages; Abbeville Press; 1st edition (Nov 1, 2001) 297 illustrations, 276 in full color

Newly revised and lavishly illustrated, this acclaimed study of Spanish master Francisco Goya reveals the artist as a pioneer of modern art and culture.

Stunning color reproductions comprehensively survey Goya's paintings and prints in this essential study of his art and its impact on the modern world. Fred Licht's masterful text, revised and updated for this edition, has been hailed as "brilliant" and "profound," one of the most original and illuminating studies of a modern European artist.

Born in 1746 in a small Aragonese town, Goya rose to prominence in Madrid in the period around 1780, being named court painter in 1786. The atrocities of the Napoleonic period and the repressions of the restored Bourbon regime led Goya to paint his greatest works, now recognized as harbingers of modern art. Goya died in exile in France in 1828.

Organized according to the mediums and genres in which the artist worked, Goya is a series of investigations of those aspects of Goya's art that make it especially relevant today. By focusing closely on the work, Licht also illuminates, as few before him have done, the enigmatic personality of this artist, who, as the author affirms, "first fixed the courage and the despair of our modern age."

Goya: Images of Women by Janis Tomlinson (Editor) Hardcover: 368 pages; Yale University Press (Mar 1, 2002)

Francisco Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) created magnificent paintings, tapestry designs, prints, and drawings over the course of his long and productive career. Women frequently appeared as the subjects of Goya's works, from his brilliantly painted cartoons for the Royal Tapestry Factory to his stunning portraits of some of the most powerful women in Madrid.

This groundbreaking book is the first to examine the representations of women within Goya's multifaceted art, and in so doing, it sheds new light on the evolution of his artistic creativity as well as on the roles assumed by women in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Spain. Many of Goya's most famous works are featured and explicated in this beautifully designed and produced book.

Francisco De Goya: Life and Work (Art in Hand) by Elke Linda Bucholz – Paperback: 96 pages; Konemann (May 2000)

Modern interpretations of Goya as a political artist, proto-Romantic rebel, fantasist or realist capture partial truths about the protean Spanish painter, suggests Columbia University art history professor Tomlinson in this meticulous, sumptuously illustrated study featuring 210 color and 70 black-and-white plates. By viewing Goya's career as a lifelong experiment with image-making, she shows how his art became a self-perpetuating process as his works fed off one another. Tomlinson argues unpersuasively that Goya's royal portraits, usually seen as savage satires, actually evince sympathy for his often homely or awkward subjects. She is more successful in elucidating his kaleidoscopic view of evil in the Los Caprichos etchings, his innovative small-scale oils and his investigations of irrationality and destructiveness in scenes of madhouses, war, the Inquisition and popular spectacles.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Francisco Goya Y Lucientes: 1746-1828 by Janis Tomlinson – Paperback: 320 pages; Phaidon Press; Reprint edition (Apr 22, 1999)

This paperback edition of the award-winning study of the life and work of Goya is filled with the same fine reproductions as the original 1994 hardcover. Goya was one of Spain's greatest and most controversial painters, famous for incisive portraits and the "black" paintings of his later years.

Goya in the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Colta Feller Ives, Susan Alyson Stein, Metropolitan Museum of Art – Hardcover: 80 pages; Museum (Sep 1995)


Goya in the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Colta Feller Ives, Susan Alyson Stein, Metropolitan Museum of Art – Paperback: 80 pages; Metropolitan Museum of Art (1995)


Romantics & Realists: Goya
Color, NTSC; 50 minutes (Aug 29, 2000)


Painting in Spain in the Age of Enlightenment: Goya and His Contemporaries by Suzanne L. Stratton (Editor), Ronda Kasl (Editor), N. Y. Spanish Institute (New York, Indianapolis Museum of Art – Paperback: 295 pages; University of Washington Press (Jan 1997)


Goya: The Portraits by Xavier Bray, B. Mena Manuela Marqués, Thomas Gayford – Hardcover: 272 pages; National Gallery London (Nov 17, 2015) Best Seller

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) was one of the greatest portraitists of his time. The first large-scale book devoted to the topic, this handsome volume features portraits that shed light on Goya and his subjects, as well as on the politically turbulent and culturally dynamic era in which they lived. Whether portraying royalty, philosophers, military men, or friends, these works are memorable both for the insight they provide into the relationship between artist and sitter, and for their penetrating psychological depth.

Goya by Werner Hofmann, Francisco Goya – Hardcover: 344 pages; Thames & Hudson (Nov 24, 2003) ;

A Goya revival much like the recent resurgence of attention paid to Vermeer and Caravaggio is under way, claiming the canny attention of Susan Sontag, Julia Blackburn, Robert Hughes, and now one more commentator with a distinct point of view. Hofmann's handsomely and generously illustrated volume, the best visual resource among the recent spate of Goya books, provides a useful corollary. The former director of the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, he offers a clarifying discussion of Goya's obsession with masquerade and his deliberate "transgression of borders" in his bold mixing of the sacred and the secular. Goya's power resides in his profound ambiguity, Hofmann argues, which is expressed most unnervingly in the print series titled "Caprichos" and the so-called Black Paintings. "Strange caprices and sober facts," witchcraft, exorcism, nightmares, violence, and conflicts between men and women, the beautiful and the homely, rich and poor, the sane and the mad—in short, the powerful and the powerless—all fascinated Goya, who invented "intricate codes" to violate tradition, express his skepticism regarding Christian salvation, satirize society, and unflinchingly depict the "sheer pandemonium" of the human condition. Hofmann goes far in articulating what it is in Goya's enduring works that so disturbs and moves us. Donna Seaman —Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Goya (Art and Ideas) by Sarah Symmons – Paperback: 352 pages; Phaidon Press (Oct 1998)


Romantics & Realists: Goya , Whistler, Courbet, Friedrich, Rossetti, Delacroix Multiple Formats, boxed set, Color, Dolby, NTSC; 6 discs (Sep 26, 2006)


Goya's Last Works by Jonathan Brown, Susan Grace Galassi Hardcover: 224 pages; Yale University Press (Mar 2, 2006)

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) spent the last four years of his life living in Bordeaux with other political émigrés from Spain and South America. In those years he created small-scale, intimate pieces, including uncommissioned portraits of friends and family, miniature paintings on ivory plaques, and numerous drawings and lithographs. These works attest to the artist’s continuing vitality in his old age and also offer insight into his life in Bordeaux.

This beautiful book presents fifty-one key works from Goya’s late period along with two essays that illuminate his works of that time. Jonathan Brown retells the story of Goya’s difficult years in exile when he nevertheless continued to make art, experimenting with the new medium of lithography, inventing a technique of miniature painting on ivory, and painting remarkable portraits of friends and supporters. Susan Grace Galassi describes the rich historical and cultural milieu of Bordeaux and establishes a biographical context and sense of place that underscore the triumph of Goya’s final achievement.

Goya by Robert Hughes – Hardcover: 448 pages; Knopf (Nov 11, 2003)

With his salient passion for the artist and the art, Hughes brings Goya vividly to life through dazzling analysis of a vast breadth of his work. Building upon the historical evidence that exists, Hughes tracks Goya’s development, as man and artist, without missing a beat, from the early works commissioned by the Church, through his long, productive, and tempestuous career at court, to the darkly sinister and cryptic work he did at the end of his life.

In a work that is at once interpretive biography and cultural epic, Hughes grounds Goya firmly in the context of his time, taking us on a wild romp through Spanish history; from the brutality and easy violence of street life to the fiery terrors of the Holy Inquisition to the grave realities of war, Hughes shows us in vibrant detail the cultural forces that shaped Goya’s work.

Underlying the exhaustive, critical analysis and the rich historical background is Hughes’s own intimately personal relationship to his subject. This is a book informed not only by lifelong love and study, but by his own recent experiences of mortality and death. As such this is a uniquely moving and human book; with the same relentless and fearless intelligence he has brought to every subject he has ever tackled, Hughes here transcends biography to bring us a rich and fiercely brave book about art and life, love and rage, impotence and death. This is one genius writing at full capacity about another—and the result is truly spectacular.

Goya and the Duchess of Alba (Pegasus Library) by Susann Waldmann, Susan Waldmann – Hardcover: 128 pages; International Book Import Service, (Sep 1998)

See "The Naked Maja" in our movie section for a Hollywood version of this subject.

These two volumes follow 25 others in the "Pegasus Library" series, advertised as presenting "the passions that drive the masters." Waldmann, a Spanish art specialist, delves into the suspicion some people have entertained over the centuries that Francisco de Goya and one of his patrons, the 13th Duchess of Alba, had an adulterous relationship. Some intriguing paintings, drawings, and prints produced in the 1790s suggest that perhaps they did, but the salacious quotes from a romantic novel and a final image of the duchess's exhumed and decayed corpse are more suited to a tabloid.

In contrast, Zollner (art history, Univ. of Leipzig) uses Sandro Botticelli's art to explore virtuous love within marriage. He discusses the intended usage of the paintings in Italian bridal chambers and cites classical and Renaissance literary references for his analysis of iconographic motifs in "La Primavera," "Birth of Venus," and several other paintings.

Translated from German, the text of both books flows clearly; they are sturdily constructed, and the color illustrations complement the text well. Certain aspects, however, such as the slender physical format and dust jackets with erotic spine and cover designs, suggest that these books are intended for gift-giving or collecting rather than purchase by libraries. The exception would be libraries that acquire every title on a particular artist. —Anne Marie Lane, American Heritage Ctr., Laramie, WY Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Goya - Reality & Invention
Color, NTSC; 30 minutes (Sep 21, 2001)

In 1973, at the age of 47, Goya suffered a near-fatal illness which left him profoundly deaf. Had he not survived, the Goya we now acknowledge as a universal and independent genius would scarcely have existed. His talent for experimentation and observation made his last thirty-five years the most productive of his life.

Goya's extraordinary inventive imagination permeates his paintings and prints of this time, but is at its most immediate and palpable in his drawings.

In eight separate albums, dating from 1796 to the time of his death in 1826, he thought and re-thought and extemporized on a vast range of subjects: from scenes of everyday life to the horrors of war; religious pageants, from carnival to Holy Week; extraordinary flights of fancy, nightmare and biting satire; and a whole range of images, encompassing majas and monks, lunatics and witches, charlatans and procuresses, dancers and roller-skaters, youth and old age.

This video begins by taking a brief look at Goya's earlier career before focusing on the period 1796-1828, exploring the drawings and their context, examining his techniques and style as well as his subject-matter.


** In order to ensure that A Stroke of Genius receives credit for your order you will need to start your shopping session from our book pages.
Any qualifying item you place in your shopping cart within 24 hours following your entry from A Stroke of Genius will be credited to
us if the purchase is made within 90 days. Credit will not be given for items already in your cart from a previous visit.


DISCLAIMER: There are many books where Amazon does not have a cover image and we have searched the web to find one. We have made
every effort to accurately represent books and their covers. However, we are not responsible for any variations from the cover displayed.


 


Search Amazon for other books or any products below!








© 1996 - Artist works, scans and web design protected by copyright.
Site designed by A Stroke of Genius, Inc.