From princes to paupers how goya's portraits tell the story of Spain

A 

There are, according to current scholarship, 160 existing portraits by Francisco de Goya - about a third of his painted output. The real number, though, is much greater since there are no pure landscapes in Goya's work, in that everything he ever painted deals with people. In the work of no other great portraitist are a nation's people, history, traumas, folk traditions, and superstitions so comprehensively and relentlessly captured. His subject was a good one since Goya lived in interesting times: his lifetime was a period that saw Spain pass through the effects of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the restoration of the monarchy; it was ruled by a succession of authoritarian and liberal governments; and was simultaneously marked by the Enlightenment. Put his work together - the public and private paintings, the personal drawings and sketches, and the unsettling and sinister etching series - and what you have is a portrait in the round of Spain itself.

B 

His work as a portraitist has its origins in the 45 tapestry cartoons he painted after he moved to Madrid in 1775. Although his designs don't show portraits, they do show types - the majos and majas who gave Madrid its street swagger, peasants and rich men, courting couples, singers, hunters, children, and young men and women playing blind man's buff or tossing a mannequin into the air. The pictures have a light, rococo palette and the faces are individualised without being those of individuals. But in them, Goya practised poses and groupings and a way of handling light on and around figures that was to be invaluable.

C 

The tapestry designs also show social roles rather than the people inhabiting them, but when it came to painting portraits proper, Goya would turn this on its head. His greatest strength as a portraitist is that regardless of the status of the sitter, be they a king and queen, the Duke of Wellington, or a doctor or writer, it was the person he showed first and their position second. It was this trait, most apparent in his royal portraiture, that has led him to be seen as satirising the Bourbon monarchy rather than as a painter who depicted what he saw without showing obeisance to the usual flattering conventions. In Robert Hughes's phrase, he did not 'pay reflexive homage to authority' but instead walked a fine line between respect and truth.

D 

Goya's success was rapid; in 1785 he was made deputy director of painting at the Royal Academy (his main message to his students was subversive - 'there are no rules in painting') and in 1786 became pintor de cámara, required to paint 'works required for royal service'. He immediately spent some of his 15,000-reales salary on a two-wheeled gig (one of only three in Madrid) which he promptly crashed on his first outing. His amour propre untouched, he wrote to his childhood friend Martín Zapater: 'I have now established an enviable way of living: I do not wait on anyone in antechambers, and if anyone wants anything from me they must come to me; I have made myself more in demand and unless it is a person of rank or at the request of a friend I would do nothing for anyone...'

E 

Part of the reason for his success was that, unlike Gainsborough, for example, he did not resent portraiture as an economically necessary chore that ate away at the time he could devote to higher art. He embraced the genre as a means of exploring human character. This genuine interest allowed him to penetrate the facade of his sitters, capturing not just their likeness but their psychological state. His portraits from the 1790s, particularly of the royal family, are masterclasses in this approach. He presented them with a stark realism that was unprecedented, grouping them in a way that highlighted their familial dynamics and individual personalities, however flawed or ordinary they might appear.

F 

This commitment to psychological truth became even more pronounced following his near-fatal illness in 1793, which left him deaf. Isolated from the world of sound, Goya’s focus turned inwards, and his work grew darker and more introspective. The light rococo tones of his tapestry cartoons gave way to a richer, somber palette and a dramatic use of chiaroscuro. His portraits from this period, such as those of the Duchess of Alba, are charged with a complex mixture of intimacy, mystery, and power. The line between observer and subject seemed to dissolve, as Goya used the portrait not for public glorification but as a form of private, almost philosophical, inquiry.

G 

Ultimately, Goya’s career traces the arc of Spain’s tumultuous age. The enlightened optimism of his early court paintings gradually soured into a profound disillusionment, vividly recorded in his later, so-called 'Black Paintings'. These murals, painted directly onto the walls of his country house, are a far cry from the formal portraits of princes and dukes. They depict haunting, mythological scenes and grotesque figures, reflecting the despair and chaos of a nation ravaged by war and repression. In this final phase, the portrait of Spain was no longer found in the faces of individuals, but in the tormented soul of its people.