Goya’s 1785 portrait of the condesa duquesa is one of the finest of his entire career, and when you reflect that only two years separate it from his relatively crude portrait of Floridablanca, you can indeed believe that she inspired him—like other painters, he responded to the critical intelligence of his sitters. He did not paint her as in any way a conventionally pretty woman—the face is a little too sharp-boned for that, the nose too long, the mouth a trifle thin—but the countess’s eyes sum you up with a level and piercing gaze, and her posture, one hand holding its fan and the other resting on the knob of a cane or parasol, bespeaks complete self-possession. She is, as the idiom of the day used to say of perfectly confident women, muy militar.
Goya, María Josefa de la Soledad, Duquesa de Osuna, o La Condesa Duquesa de Benavente, 1785. Oil on canvas, 104 × 80 cm. Colección Bartolomé March. (illustration credit 4.22)
Goya has painted her in terms of subtle gradations of color, translucent glazes overlaid with delicate passages of impasto. This ability to convey ranges of visual distinction through glazes without compromising the strength of forms was Goya’s reward for the time he must have spent studying the Old Masters in Don Luis’s collection in Arenas, and in the Royal Palace in Madrid. The condesa duquesa’s own sense of style is clearly impeccable. Her dark Prussian-blue dress is softened by cloudlets of cream lace, and Goya has taken a palpable delight in rendering the visual rhymes between the broad bow of pink silk ribbon that ornaments her bodice, the loops of the same ribbon, embellished with tiny flowers and an egret plume, in her hat, and—an exquisite touch, for which one must thank her peluquero rather than her painter—the way in which the wide stiffened curls of her hair repeat the forms of the ribbon. Discriminating in this as in all things, she had taken into her employ a French hairdresser named Brayeu, who modeled her hair on a tocado done for Marie-Antoinette. Goya sets before us a woman of great style but no frivolity, and this, in essence, was the truth about the condesa duquesa.
The whole family was the subject of one of Goya’s early group portraits, now in the Prado. They are posed together as a tight-knit unit, the count and countess with their two daughters and two sons. In 1787-88, when the picture was painted, family groups were distinctly uncommon in Spanish art: Velázquez, for instance, was never once called upon to paint one. The Family of the Duke of Osuna is one of Goya’s three masterpieces in this genre, the others being the family group of Don Luis and, of course, that of Carlos IV and his relatives (this page). But it is unlike the group portrait of Don Luis’s family in that the latter belongs more to the English tradition of the portrait as conversation piece, in which people are seen reacting to and conversing with one another in an imaginary narrative where they seem unaware of the painter’s gaze. In the Osuna group portrait, the family looks back straight at the painter and, therefore, at us; they have no reason, so to speak, for being there except to be seen as they want to be by us. There are six pairs of eyes in the portrait, backed up by eight pairs of prominent round buttons on the tight-laced bodices of the duchess and her daughter Josefa Manuela, and everyone is staring straight at us in a friendly, slightly questioning way that makes us wonder what we are doing here. The fact that the Osunas chose the format of the family group portrait is in itself an indication of their openness to innovation. They paid Goya 4,000 reales for it. A year later, with his growing reputation, he would ask for and get 4,500 reales for the full-length, single figure he did of the conde de Cabarrús, now in the collection of the Banco de España; his standard price for a half-length portrait, of which he did several for the directors of the bank, became 3,000 reales.23
Goya, The Family of the Duke of Osuna, 1788. Oil on canvas, 225 × 174 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 4.23)
The Osuna group is exquisitely painted, with soft transitions of tone and no sharp highlights or shadows. Goya has paid homage to one of the most durable traditions of Spanish portraiture, its austerity: black, white, green, a neutral brown, a touch—no more—of red. It is essentially the palette of Velázquez. The strongest color is black, the mourning black of the suit of the duke, whose father had recently died, in April 1787, leaving him the title and the obligation of three months’ strict mourning, followed by nine months of lesser mourning dress. The duke is not wearing deep mourning—the silver embroidery and red details of his suit show that he is in medio luto, half-mourning—and so the portrait must have been painted between July 1787 and April 1788.24
He looks, however, rather pictorially stiff and formal, and the schematic formality of the black and silver suit contrasts a little awkwardly with the soft way in which his face is painted—it is not quite strong enough to carry out its function as the keystone, the apex of the composition’s triangle. No such problem exists with the figure of the duchess, which is much more unified, because blander throughout. She wears a beautifully rendered dress of gray mousseline de soie, finished with white lace and traces of pink. She is the epitome of fashion, down to the last hair in her coiffure; but one also notices that her only adornment is the large buttons, which carry enamel portraits, presumably of her family. She wears no jewelry, and apparently no makeup. This relative austerity announces that she is not a frivolous showoff but an ilustrada de primera clase, close to her husband yet independent of him—a woman of the Enlightenment.
The Osunas’ four children, who gaze at the painter with such enchanting, round-eyed composure, complete the group. From left to right, they are Francisco de Borja, Pedro de Alcántara (seated on the green cushion), Joaquina, and the elder daughter, Josefa Manuela. They have identifying attributes: the two girls, dressed in the same gray silk as their mother, hold fans; the two boys, in their green suits and pink sashes, have toys emblematic of their gender. Francisco bestrides his father’s gold cane of office as a hobbyhorse, a fitting symbol, since he is the elder son and thus the heir; Pedro has a handsome little toy carriage on a string. In due course the little girls will marry other aristocrats, Francisco will inherit the title, and Pedro will become one of the first directors of the Prado Museum—a nice symmetry, since that is where Goya’s portrait of them all will end up.
As Goya’s relations with the Osunas became firmer and more regular, he was invited to visit them at their beautiful villa, the Alameda Palace, known as El Capricho, and to do decorative paintings for its rooms. These were an idiosyncratic mélange based on models of French Rococo decoration such as Fragonard—but with a decided twist.
The painting that shows the most incongruity between Goya’s (and his patrons’) imagination and the model they had chosen is Highwaymen Attacking a Coach (1786–87). It is French pastorale with murder in it—a most peculiar contradiction. It is as though some hostess in Bridgehampton decided, for her and her guests’ amusement, to decorate her living room with a scene of armed thugs plundering a car wreck on the Long Island Expressway. Instead of the conventional and pleasant “gallant encounter” of country swains and milkmaid-nymphs under Fragonard’s feathery trees, we get the Frenchman’s green scallops of dense foliage, the same ice-blue sky and ice-cream clouds, but with blood, hysteria, terror of rape, and stabbing going on beneath them—a situation unknown to French art of the Rococo period. Suddenly, a little Spanish realism has pushed itself into a pastoral dream.
The picture represents what must have been one of the Osuna family’s worst anxieties when they made their trips between the city and their country house on the then-bucolic outskirts of Madrid. In the 1780s the roads of Spain, even those near the city, were scarcely policed at all, and banditry was common. Not chivalrous Robin-Hoodery, either: the thieves and muggers who infested the roads and lay in wait for travelers were a violent and nasty lot, and God help anyone who fell into their hands or, once in their power, resisted. Goya would have more to say about this in later drawings and paintings, but here he has been given, or assigned himself, the impossible task of turning bandits into a picturesque cast of characters fit for the Osunas’ drawing-room wall. Presumably
he was hoping to produce something along the lines of the Italian artist Salvator Rosa’s woodland scenes with picturesque bandits, which had been so wildly popular among European collectors when Goya was on his visit to Rome. They were considered by many to be the acme of tormented sublimity, the wildness of nature repeated in the wildness of its human inhabitants. “Precipices, mountains, torrents, wolves, rumblings—Salvator Rosa,” Horace Walpole jotted in 1739 while intrepidly crossing the Alps. What Goya did produce is a Spanish version of atque in Arcadia ego—death in Arcadia.
Goya, Asalto de ladrones (Highwaymen Attacking a Coach), 1786-87. Oil on canvas, 169 × 127 cm. Private collection. (illustration credit 4.24)
In this green glade, a coach has been bailed up. Even if we didn’t notice the gilding around the coachwork and the fashionable though rather cumbersome pattern of design—two small wheels at the front and a pair of enormous ones at the rear, which made it difficult to back the coach out of the mud when it got bogged down, as often happened on those wretched roads—we would know it for a rich family’s vehicle because it is drawn by four mules, the largest traction team allowed a private owner by the sumptuary laws of Carlos III. (The royal family, and they alone, could use six animals.) Four bandits have stopped and overpowered the coach and its passengers. The driver lies dead on the sandy ground, weltering in his blood. Next to him on the ground, a bandit and a male passenger are struggling in a knot of limbs; the gleam of the señorito’s silver shoe buckles is brighter than the shine on the dagger in his assailant’s hand, but there is no doubt which of them is about to die. On the far right, the military guard—it was never wise to travel without one—lies facedown and dead, his red tunic the one spot of complementary color against all the surrounding green. He is still clutching the sword he drew too late before a blast from the trabuco, the blunderbuss held by the bandit who is glaring watchfully from the driver’s seat of the coach, cut him down. Interestingly, the guard is lying in exactly the same pose that Goya would repeat several times in future drawings and paintings to indicate a dead body, so that it became part of his shorthand for death—the most memorable and vivid example being the dead man facedown to the left of the French firing squad in the Tres de Mayo, his hands scrabbling palms-down at the earth. Goya, archrealist though he was by the standards of his day, had a repertoire of standard poses that he would produce as signifiers of particular feelings.
Two others who had been riding in the coach, a man in majo dress and a woman similarly garbed, are kneeling before two of the robbers, imploring their mercy. There isn’t much doubt about what is in store. The upper-class pseudoproletarian costume of majismo is not going to appeal to the bandits, one of whom carries a length of rope to tie them up. Fashion has had the ill luck to meet the real thing.
The most direct reference to French Rococo pleasure outings in this little set of pictures made for the villa is The Swing (1787), where Goya takes his motif from Fragonard: a pretty girl swinging to and fro on a rope slung between two trees, watched by three male companions dressed as majos and two other girls, one of them twanging a lute. (Goya’s own inventory description makes it clear that they are all Gypsies.) And yet even here a faint tremor of apprehension—a sense that the world is insecure, which is very characteristic of Goya—is allowed to intrude: the rope on which she is swinging is tied together by a large, prominent, and rather insecure-looking knot, which could come undone at any moment. The conceit is much like the improvised knot in the much later print from the Desastres de la guerra in which an ecclesiastic in a tiara and flowing robes is seen teetering along a slack rope above the heads of the skeptical crowd, an insecure funambulist (representing the restored Church authority after the return to power of Fernando VII) who could crash down at any moment—“Quese rompe la cuerda,” reads Goya’s caption, “May the rope snap.” No such malign thought is directed toward the innocent girl on the swing, but all the same we see Goya’s implicit twist on the playful eroticism of a Fragonard: these are a sextet of real Gypsies, so to stress their bohemianism, their gear should be ill-maintained.
Other panels in the series depict more country pleasures. Children climb a greasy pole in the course of celebrating a saint’s day. There is a country church procession (1787) in honor of the Virgin Mary, whose effigy is being carried on a platform downhill from the entrance, followed by a well-upholstered-looking priest, a bagpiper, and some town officials; though one authority finds it “bordering on satire,” the satire, if it exists, is very mild.25 In the end, the Osunas acquired more than twenty paintings by Goya, mostly small ones. They commissioned religious ones in memory of their relatives, including two scenes from the life of a priestly ancestor of the duchess, St. Francis Borgia. These were destined for a chapel in the cathedral of Valencia, where they were hung high on the wall: this seems to have given Goya leave to pull out all the emotional stops, for the second of the two, St. Francis Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent (1788), is as melodramatic a piece of diablerie as he ever painted. In fact, it is the first of Goya’s paintings in which demons take a starring role. Bat wings, saber teeth, and all, they hunch and leer in a sort of red mist over the body of the dying man, and it is clear that none of St. Francis’s exhortations can reach him. Not even Christ’s blood can: the little figure of the Redeemer on the crucifix St. Francis brandishes is so insulted by the impenitence of the sinner that he flings a handful of his own blood at him, but it does no good at all. One senses that, even though Goya does appear to have been a man of some sincere religious belief—he was an ilustrado but by no means an atheist, a point to which we must come back—he found this particular story a little hard to swallow.
Goya, San Francisco de Borja asiste a un moribundo impenitente (St. Francis Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent) (detail), 1788. Oil on canvas, 350 × 300 cm. Cathedral de Valencia. (illustration credit 4.25)
Later he would paint a number of brujerías, witch paintings, and these were bought—or perhaps actually commissioned—by the Osunas. But in the meantime, a near-catastrophe struck.
TOWARD 1792 Goya found himself getting bored with the tapestries. Certain assumptions that were in the air in Madrid had also begun to grate on him: in particular, ideas about idealism versus naturalism that originated with Mengs, the classicist leader of academic ideas.
He let his dissatisfaction show in a report he was invited to make to the Academy of San Fernando on the subject of teaching art. In this, one of the few expressions of theory this supremely untheoretical painter ever allowed himself, Goya’s opinions amounted to a rejection of Mengs and most things he stood for—especially art based on rules, precepts, or anything except observation of “divine nature.” Parts of the report, indeed, might have been written by William Blake in full spate against Sir Joshua Reynolds and his Discourses, for example: “[T]here are no rules in painting, and … the oppression, or servile obligation, of making all study or follow the same path is a great impediment for the Young who profess this very difficult art that approaches the divine more than any other.” It is not hard to see running through Goya’s discourse the same love of the empirical, the same insistence on following observed nature rather than inherited rules and precepts, that animated the scientific thought of the Enlightenment. “What a scandal,” he writes,
to hear nature deprecated in comparison to Greek statues by one who knows neither one nor the other without acknowledging that the smallest part of Nature confounds and amazes those who know most! What statue or cast of it might there be that is not copied from divine nature? As excellent as the artist may be who copied it, can he not but proclaim that when placed at its side, one is the work of God, and the other of our own miserable hands? He who wishes to distance himself, to correct [nature] without seeking the best of it, can he help but fall into a reprehensible and monotonous manner, of paintings, of plaster models?26
Without the imitation of nature there is nothing he continues; all the rest is the “oppression” of “tired styles” that lead to
“nothing good in painting.” It is doubtful whether the worthy members of the academy had ever heard a colleague rip into academic tendencies with such unmannerly vigor.
In terms of pedagogy, he was right, and his views on how painting could be taught were irreproachably modern. But they also betokened a certain shortness of temper, an impatience with the whole idea of repetition, for he was beginning to feel that his own work for the tapestry factory, his bread and butter, was getting oppressive and boring. A crisis was brewing, and at the end of 1792 Goya abruptly broke off work on his tapestry designs and, without explanation, left Madrid for the south. In January 1793 the secretary to the Osuna family had a note from him saying he had been ill in bed for two months; now he wanted permission to drop the tapestry projects and go to Sevilla and Cádiz for a while to recuperate. This was almost certainly postdated; probably the illness, whatever it was, caught up with Goya in Andalucía some time before, when he was staying with a friend in Cádiz named Sebastián Martínez.
It was the last letter Goya would write for some time. No one can say what laid him low and so nearly killed him. He heard loud and constant noises, buzzing and roaring and ringing, in his head. But he had more and more difficulty hearing the sounds of the real world, and could hardly make out the syllables of ordinary speech. His balance was badly affected; he could not go up and down stairs without feeling in danger of falling over. He had fainting fits and spells of semi-blindness. As happens with disturbances of equilibrium, he often felt nauseated and ready to throw up. Gradually the more humiliating symptoms receded, but from 1793 onward, after he had turned forty-six, Goya would be functionally deaf. “My dear soul,” he wrote to Zapater in March, “I can stand on my own feet, but so poorly that I don’t know if my head is on my shoulders; I have no appetite or desire to do anything at all. Only your letters cheer me up—only yours. I don’t know what will become of me now that I’ve lost sight of you; I who idolize you have given up hope that you’ll ever glance at these blurred lines and get consolation from them.”27
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