Francesco de Goya

Then personal considerations must be borne in mind, the artists' age, his poor health and even, perhaps, the affair he might have been having with Leocadia Zorrilla, not to mention, though we must, the taste he had acquired for comfortable middle class living for which the new house made a very worthy setting. Professionally, there is the fact the Goya had been gradually easing up on his activity as Painter to the Royal Household, his obligations here being met, more and more, by Vicente Lopez. This is by no means to say the Goya renounced his post as the king’s painter however, for he held on to this even after his flight to France.

These self same factors also serve to allow for a discussion of the drives that gave rise to the works themselves, for they are shot through with a sharp disdain for institutions like the Inquisition, scorn both violence and empty habit, are soaked in an overall air of airlessness and gloom, an air that echoes the toll of the painter's aging and recurrent illness - which went through a turn for the worse in late 1819-as it does his state of mind and of heart. Pictures he would have found it hard to have done had he been fully busied with fulfilling his duties as Painter Royal. Be all this as it might be, it is as true that the tremendous physical outpouring that the "Black Paintings" represent is not commonly found among the depressed. His scorn for the Inquisition is against a body formally abolished in March 1820 in a moment of hope for the liberals who had made Ferdinand VII submit to swearing the Constitution of 1812. To this must be added the fact that the works were conceived as "General (pictorial) Reflexions" and not as representing any concrete or special events. This leads to think of the "Black Paintings" as being the outcome of a process of drawing overall conclusions or summing up both from the political march of events and the artist's private and professional experiences and, as such, of them as not being tied in with giving shape to things specific but rather as representing new insights into a world seen as essentially tragic.

Goya painted fourteen oils in all directly on to the walls of two rooms, rooms which measured approximately 9.02 x 4.51 metres and differed as to the surfaces available. In each of the side walls of the lower room there were two gaps that thus imposed a broad horizontal composition between them, whereas in the upper room, there being but one gap, two compositions, likewise horizontal though smaller, were called for. The remaining, vertical format works were done on either side of the rooms' doors. The original placing of each work has long taxed the historian, as this is seen as being one of the keys to the overall development of images undertaken by the artist.

They were executed between 1819/20 and 1823 and their existence was attested by Antonio Brugada in his inventory of the effects made on the painter's death (1828). They stayed where they were but none too well looked after until the last owner of the house, Baron F.E. d'Erlanger called in Salvador Martinez Cubells, the then restorer to the Prado Museum, to lift them and re-back them on canvas in 1874. After being shown at the Paris World Fair of 1878, they were made over to the State in 1881 and thus came to us at the Prado Museum.

Transferring them to canvas entailed changes in their size, some damage, some touching up and re-painting despite which the works were not robbed of their aesthetic impact or their power of suggestion. X-ray study has revealed that they are painted over other, unfinished, works that were in the main, brighter landscape studies with small figures much more in keeping with the decoration for a country house. When he painted these pictures why he painted them over or out is, likewise, unknown to us as if why he at times retained parts of them at others obliterated them altogether or why he always altered their mood. Some idea of them can be had from the background landscape to The Single Stick Duel and the left background to The Pilgrimage to Saint Isidro's Spring the artist in both cases here leaving in part of his first work as valid.

It should always be remembered that these are a linked series of works, a whole, and that there is much relevant interplay between them.

TASKS