Francisco de Goya
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) is one of the greatest Spanish artists of all times. His work includes portraits, history (especially war) scenes, religious subjects, and cartoons.
Goya has been the official court portrait painter and painted the portraits of Spanish royalty and nobility, but at the same time painted scenes from daily life and ordinary people.
Black paintings
Towards the end of his life, Goya had become withdrawn, embittered, disillusioned. He was deaf, he had fallen out of grace with the royal court, his country was at war again. Between 1819 and 1823, when Goya was well in his 70s, he painted a series of fourteen or fifteen dark, disturbing, enigmatic images directly onto the plastered walls of two large rooms (one upstairs, one downstairs) in his country house. These paintings, that were later transferred to canvas, are now known as las pinturas negras, the black paintings.
Table of contents
A manola, doña Leocadia ZorillaSaturn devouring one of his children
Judith and Holofernes
The witches' sabbath or the great he-goat
Two friars
Two old people eating
Heads in a landscape
Two men fighting with clubs
The reading
Two women and a man
Pilgrimage to St. Isidore's hermitage
The fates
Pilgrimage to St. Isidore's well
Asmodea
Half-submerged dog
Plan of the two rooms
Further reading
These articles also appeared in the series Goya's black paintings on Masterpieces.
