“The great merit of Goya consists in creating the monstrous probable one.” The word of Baudelaire in connection with that which knew, through tragic series of etchings but also of the very official portraits of the Spanish nobility, to show a truth, however cruel it, is joined that of Malraux: “All this court which was filled up of its name gleams for us of its black sun”.

The life of Goya is (Francisco Goya there Lucientes) rather well-known thanks to the followed correspondence which it maintained with a childhood friend, Martín Zapater. Born on on March 30th, 1746 in Fuendetodos, village close to Saragossa, where his/her father is Master gilder, Francisco de Goya there Lucientes probably enters around twelve years the workshop of the painter Juan Ramírez, and attends then that of Jose Luzán.

At seventeen years, Goya leaves for Madrid, where it contributes for a purse of the academy San Fernando: first failure, follow-up of another, three years later. Goya then makes the traditional voyage to Rome. In 1771, from return to Saragossa, it receives an ordering of importance, the decoration of a ceiling of the basilica Nuestra Señora del Pilar. The following year, it carries out paintings for the Charterhouse of Dei Hall. Seven vast compositions equip the walls with the church. The monumental figures modelled by broad luminous plans are drawn up in a space projected towards the spectator. All the scenes, drawn from the Gospel according to Luc saint, become animated with a simplicity of means which announces already works of maturity.

In 1774, Goya goes back to Madrid, where the brother of his wife Josefa, Francisco Bayeu, is a painter in sight. Spain then sees clashing two esthetics, since, in 1771, Mengs, cantor of the neoclassicism, followed Charles III of Bourbon to Madrid, just as Tiepolo, called by the king to decorate the rooms with the Royal palace. Such an amount of the inventive genius Tiepolo, which removes the structure from and recreates space by the movement of the light, that the rationalism and the intellectualism of Mengs will influence Goya, whose career inhabitant of Madrid opens under the sign of the constraint and of family protection: Raphael Mengs and Francisco Bayeu obtain to him orders for the royal Manufacture of Santa Bárbara.

Thus, in eighteen years, Goya will produce three series of paperboards of tapestry (1774-1780, 1786-1788, 1791-1792), of which it dominates little by little the technical requirements, at the same time as it releases itself from the Italian influences. The popular scenes, hunting, fishing are the subjects of these oils, appreciated by the king. This activity with the profit of Manufacture is badly remunerated, and Goya in parallel continues a career of portraitist, by which success astonishes sometimes. With a first series marked by the constraint and the stiffness of the installations and the composition, but already impressed of a worrying psychological penetration, made continuation one second, characterized by a single life and an innovative technical control. It is the case of the portraits of Charles IV and the Marie-Louise Queen, returned with a cruel realism.

On the other hand, the rigidity and imbalance introduced by hypertrophied toilet requisites mark most its female official portraits, like the Duchess of Osuna (1785) or the Marchioness of Solana (1792), whose major and delicate softness does not equalize that of the portrait of the sister of the painter, Rita Goya there Lucientes (1789-1792). If Goya carries out powerful portraits like Tirana (1790-1792) or Martincho (1790-1792), its innovative genius and rebel seem choked in the portraits of order, even if its satirical spirit is disguised little there, and so under which sparkles painting borer often the lampoon. That does not prevent it, thanks to surprising the perspicacity of the king and in support of Bayeu, to be appointed painter of the Room of the king in 1789. Meanwhile, always thanks to his brother-in-law, he was elected regular member of the academy San Fernando. This rise was not done without clashes, disappointments, jealousies: dissensions with his/her brother-in-law appeared, in the years 1780, in connection with the decoration of the basilica of Pilar in Saragossa, occasion for Goya to affirm its independence, while declaring, in particular: “Works which I carried out do not allow me, without missing with my honor, to depend in an absolute way of another artist”.

The intensive and regular work of Goya is stopped in 1792 by long and serious disease. Become deaf, it launches out in a series of “tables of cabinet”, which enable him to satisfy its imagination and its imagination more than “work on order, where the whim and the invention cannot be developed”. In 1795, Goya is named director of the Academy of painting. Two years later, its infirmity prevents it from exerting its function. However, it will preserve the honorary title of director. It is also in 1795 qu ' it makes the first portrait of the duchess of Alba. Even if it is probable that Goya fell in love with its model, nothing does not attest the intimacy that romantic accounts and tendentious interpretations of certain drawings lent to them, nor that the duchess posed for the maja desnuda and the maja vestida.

Whereas the painter enjoys the regard of the dukes of Osuna, who order a series of small tables to him, Goya undertakes in 1798 the decoration of the church Ermita de San Antonio from Florida, in Madrid. The miracle of the resurrection of a death per Antoine saint who decorates the cupola takes again with a total freedom the first tests carried out with the Charterhouse of Saragossa. It is an already romantic esthetics which governs the composition, where are combined the beautiful one and the monstrous one, in a work of synthesis and transition, one of the tops of the innovative genius of Goya, which, locked up in its deafness, leaves from now on free course with what appears to him to be essence: the truth and nature - those of the man.

In 1799 the collection of the 80 boards of the Whims appears, preceded since 1796 by two “albums of Sanlúcar”, joining together washings with the Indian ink. To obtain effects close to the washing, Goya associates etching and aquatinte. The last two thirds of the Whims are accompanied by legends written by painter, for whom this series constitutes a collection of illustrated thoughts: attentive with the reality which surrounds it, open to the oneiric universes, it gives to these popular proverbs and sayings a universal dimension, and expresses through them its revolt against the superstition and the useless spite of its time. The madness, fanaticism, sorcery, which levels already in the fresco of the vault of San Antonio of Florida in 1798, become in its etchings the object of a violent denunciation. Its Saint François Borgia assisting a dying man falls under this search for a total freedom of made reality interior or spiritual, which finds its roots in the medieval traditions. But the Enquiry takes care, and Goya escapes from it only because it yielded to the king, in 1803, 80 coppers and most of the 267 unsold specimens.

Years 1800-1808 are remembered by the war and the French occupation. Liberal Goya, which sees of a favorable eye the introduction of political reforms - even by average outsides -, is shocked by violences and the exactions of the French Army. However it remains in the camp of the “afrancesados” and lives Madrid, in the sphere of Joseph Ier, placed on the throne of Spain by Napoleon. He continues his activity of portraitist and realizes, of 1805 to 1810, several died natures, including one worrying Tête of sheep. It is at that time that he undertakes the 82 boards of the Disasters of the war, whose about twenty prints will circulate around 1842, but whose whole will be published only in 1863. In 1813, the treaty of Valençay puts an end to the war. The following year, Goya paints El back of mayo, or the Attack against the Mamelukes with Puerta del Sol, and El very of mayo, or the Shootings of Moncloa, while taking again its place with the Academy and near the king. The ambiguous attitude of Goya incarnates this ravaged and divided Spain which accommodates Ferdinand VII in “saver”. This one restores the court of the Enquiry, which - before disappearing definitively in 1820 - will carry out brutal and arbitrary purification in the medium of the liberal opposition.

In 1819, Goya buys, not far from Madrid, a country house which will become the “house of the Deaf person”, refuge and space of freedom creative where its invention set of themes and technique will be expressed, and where it will realize, probably in 1821-1822, its “black” paintings. But the policy of oppression of Ferdinand VII pokes the fratricidal fights and more moves away Goya from the public life, while his/her only son, who required the execution of the will after the death of Josefa, recovers the house of Carabanchel which the painter has just bought and to decorate by putting at it more the close friend of itself. In 1824, it joined all his friends exiled in France, under the official pretext to take water with Plombières. Having obtained a leave of the king and the maintenance of his pension, Goya will live its last years accompanied by Leocadia Weiss, a cousin of his wife, in Bordeaux, which it will leave only for one incursion in Madrid and a short stay in Paris.

The draft with the pencil representing an hoary old man curved on canes, with the legend “Aún aprendo” (“I still learn”), is emblematic of exiled Goya: with soixante-treize years, he discovers the very new process of the lithography, undertakes his series on the bullfighting, whose first edition will be published only in 1855, and carries out a series of small tables and of miniatures on ivory. To eighty one years, it shows with the Dairy one of Bordeaux of a spirit research which will live it until its death, in April 1828.

In spite of a training in workshop, Goya is actually an autodidact, and the traditional means of painting remain impotent to translate what it has to express. Youth and the first years inhabitants of Madrid of this painter who recognizes only three Masters, Vélasquez, Rembrandt and nature, resemble more one long interior maturation stimulated by the models which are offered to him than with a true training. This impression is consolidated by an official report of the academy San Fernando, in 1792: “Mr. Goya is against any servile and school tender, against the mechanical processes.”

The originality and the power of Goya, which continue since 1771 in the Dream of Joseph saint and the Visitation, are expressed through all the fields of painting: in the field of the composition, where the monumental presence of the characters is essential with force, preceding, with its Majas with the balcony, audacities of Manet; in the field of the drawing, where the feature is erased to make place with the forms animated by the color and the masses of shade; in that finally of the topics, with the daring irruption of beyond or the transmutation of subjects as traditional as the official portrait or the naked female one.

Goya reaches a single dramatic intensity by reducing its color range, by making an intense use of the black and by combining the use of the brush and the spatula with that of the reed. Cut and split, this one can be used only with fluid pastes, difficult technique which allows incomparable light effects by its irregular and friable layouts, as in the Hurricane and the Procession of the penitent ones.

Goya will continue this work on textures until 1827. By simplified forms, carved by the light and the alchemy of the pastes and the colors, it reaches what it regards as the ends of painting: the major truth and the nature of the man.