Francisco de Goya

Goya’s early paintings range from aristocratic portraiture to late baroque subject pictures influenced by a visit to Italy and contact with the Neapolitan artist Corrado Giaquinto (1703–66). His most successful early project was a series of cartoons for the royal tapestry factory, commissioned through the Giaquinto follower Francisco Bayeu (1734–95). These scenes of country life are still in the hedonistic world of Watteau and his followers and the Venetian Rococo, for example The Parasol. Goya’s early portraits also owe much to Venice and it was the esteem he enjoyed in this field that led to his appointment as court painter on the eve of the French Revolution. After an illness, Goya’s view of life darkened and he issued his first great series of prints Los Caprichos, which bitingly criticized the existing social order. Goya continued his successful portrait practice with paintings of royalty, high society and government officials. His royal portraits have been considered unflattering, but they can also be seen as refreshingly honest and a tribute to the new meritocratic ideas spreading from France. His powerful and sexually-charged portraits of the Duchess of Alba, supposedly Goya’s mistress, and of the Marquesa de Santa Cruz, are upstaged (though not by much) by his Naked Maja and Clothed Maja, both painted for the royal favorite Manuel Godoy.