Francisco Goya Prints

About Francisco Goya

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was born in 1746 at Fuendetodos in Aragon and trained in Zaragoza under José Luzán and later Francisco Bayeu, whose sister he married in 1773. From 1775 he designed tapestry cartoons for the Royal Tapestry Factory in Madrid, scenes of picnics, games and markets that brought him to the court; he became painter to Charles III in 1786 and to Charles IV in 1789. A severe illness in 1792 to 1793 left him deaf, and his work darkened. Los Caprichos, eighty satirical etchings, appeared in 1799, and after the French occupation he painted The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808 in 1814, the latter the first modern painting of an execution, now in the Prado. In his seventies he covered the walls of his house outside Madrid with the fourteen Black Paintings, including Saturn Devouring His Son, and in 1824 he left Spain for Bordeaux, where he died in April 1828. Goya moved from Rococo lightness to a bleakness no one had painted before, and both halves of that career hang well: the early cartoons as colour, the late work as pure drama.