|
Goya arrived in Madrid in 1775
from his native Saragossa where he was born in 1746. He began painting cartoons
for the royal tapestry factory of Santa Barbara through the connections of his
new brother-in-law, the court painter Francisco Bayeu. Until Goya's time,
artists had painted cartoons illustrating a series of events from one story and
created scenes with a generic similarity defined by pastoral, peasant, or
aristocratic subject matter. Goya rethought this model and chose contemporary
life in late 18th century Madrid and juxtaposed scenes to give a view
that incorporated characters from all classes, and even from other religions and
countries.
|
|
Goya continued to paint tapestries until 1792, when he suffered a severe illness that
weakened him and left him deaf for life. Prior to his illness he
had already expressed his dissatisfaction with his lowly assignment. Having been
appointed court painter in 1789, and having established himself as a portraitist
of Madrid society during the 1780s, he clearly thought that he deserved more
respectable commissions. His last tapestry implied a more cynical outlook than his
previous scenes, which perhaps might have been a result of his disappointment.
The illness left Goya too weak to
be able to paint large-scale tapestries, so in 1793 he resumed his work as
a portrait painter of Madrid's elite but he also, simultaneously, turned to
smaller works, paintings, drawings and eventually etchings. He realised that
this uncomissioned work gave him ground for new experimentation.
These works apparently found buyers because
he continued to paint smaller works for the rest of his life. In addition
to these paintings, he began to execute intricate drawings that would
eventually form eight albums, executed from the mid-1790s till his death in 1828.
But perhaps the most famous testimony of this experimentation is Goya's first
series of etchings published in 1799 and described in a newspaper article from that
year as depicting "capricious subjects". In this series of eighty aquatint etchings,
Goya introduces the fantastic themes that he had developed in drawings of
the mid-1790s, clearly thinking that he would find a market for the reproduced
images. These etchings, probably undertaken around 1796, reveal Goya's interest in the
interplay of multiple and often seemingly disparate themes that justifies the
title of "Los Caprichos" (The Caprices) by which the work has become universally
known.
|
