Goya
Page 45
I wouldn’t copy them, because today I have better possibilities that would sell more usefully. As a matter of fact, last winter I was painting on ivory; I’ve already got a collection of forty studies, but these are original miniatures, of a kind I’ve never seen before, entirely done with the point of a brush, with details that are closer to the brushwork of Velázquez than to that of Mengs.11
Goya was referring to the striking contrast between the tiny size of these figures on ivory plaques—no more than two or three inches square—and the broad scale on which they were painted. Normally a miniature on ivory was tightly rendered, its brushstrokes almost indistinguishable in their licked stippling—like a Mengs, in fact.
Goya, “Seated maja and majo,” 1824–25. Carbon black and watercolor on ivory, 90 × 84 mm. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. (illustration credit 10.18)
But these were rough for their size, their treatment broad, more reminiscent of the big planes of Velázquez that fell into proportion when seen from a distance. Goya did them by covering the little ivory plaque with a dark ground and then letting fall a drop or two of water, dissolving the pigment, making it blot, flow, and granulate. Blots suggested shapes, light welled up inside the darkness, and Goya—like Leonardo before him, prompted by the random patterns of salts or lichens on old walls—encouraged chance to do the work of suggestion, prodding it along with feathery touches of the brush and cunning applications of a darker shadow. On this tiny scale he produced broad effects, as in the Stockholm “Seated maja and majo” (1825), where the leaning black bulk of the man’s cloak seems about to overwhelm the more delicate shawl and skirt of the maja.
These were Goya’s last true paintings in a liquid medium, tiny though they were. The old man’s strength and stamina were fading. But the intensity of the marks he made was not. It was as though the pictures were becoming smaller in order to concentrate the same pressure of feeling, of that vitality of touch, living in every line, which the Chinese called ch’i. He would not condescend to make works of art merely to sell them. He still despised self-repetition. Instead of creating a little stock of images to sell, Goya did not hesitate—due to the scarcity of ivory—to erase one image to make room for another. They were all jostling at the base of his brain, demanding release. He was truly off on his own now, making for making’s sake, on the tiniest of scales. Sometimes he would do an etching, based on a drawing. One such drawing is the marvelously energetic image of a wildly grinning old troll with horny feet, swinging on a rope, in total disregard of the dignity of age. This translates into one of his last etchings—the same subject, the crazy old barefoot sage, ignoring gravity and cackling to himself like a Zen patriarch absorbed in a private but cosmic joke: Goya himself, high in the air.
Goya, “Old man on a swing.” Drawing. The Hispanic Society of America, New York. (illustration credit 10.19)
Goya, “Old man on a swing,” 1824–28. Etching and burnished aquatint. Bildarchiv Prenssischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. (illustration credit 10.20)
He had no real studio. That is why his output of paintings dwindled to a few portraits: that, and the depletion of his energies—one finds him complaining that even the effort of writing a letter tired him out.12 But when Goya really wanted to paint someone, he insisted on it, and Leandro Moratín (whose likeness, heavy-jowled and potato-nosed, he had done in 1824, a quarter-century after first painting him as a young and sensitive-looking playwright) reported from Bordeaux that “he wants to paint me, and from that you can imagine how pretty I am, when such expert brushes aspire to multiply my images.”13
But beyond formal portraiture, the old curiosity was still there, burning and scratching through his drawings, of which two small albums (labeled G and H) survive. It may be that Goya thought of them as possible elements in a set of new Caprichos, easier to sell than his corrida lithographs—but that is only a guess.
The drawings in the first Bordeaux album, G, are of two main subjects: forms of transport (mostly for the disabled) and states of insanity. They are done not with the brush, pen, and ink he had used in earlier studies for etchings, but with a soft black crayon resembling the greasy lithographic crayon he had used in the bullfight prints. It produced a more blurred and atmospheric line, which is sometimes at odds with the ferocious weirdness of the subject he was drawing. The drawings fall into two broad groups: things that he saw or might have seen in real life, and things he imagined. In the first group were some figures and scenes whose reality cannot now be tested. Did he actually “see” the extraordinary, onrushing figure engulfed in flames and smoke (#22), or is it an after-memory of one of the painted Caprichos he did after his 1792 illness, “Fire at night”? But there can be little doubt that the amputated beggar in his wheelchair (#29) and the hunched figure pulled in a dogcart behind an eager, straining mastiff (#31, captioned “I saw this in Paris”) are things he witnessed. So are the wobbling roller skater and the more lightly traced velocipedist behind him (#32, “Crazy skates”).
Goya, Bordeaux Album I, 22, Fuego (“Fire”) 1825–28. Charcoal. Museé du Louvre, Paris. (illustration credit 10.21)
Goya, Bordeaux Album I, 29, Mendigos que se lleban solos en Bordeaux (“Beggars who get around on their own in Bordeaux”), 1824–27. Black chalk on gray laid paper, 19 × 14 cm. Woodner Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (illustration credit 10.22)
Goya, Bordeaux Album I, 32, Locos patines (“Crazy skates”), 1825–28. Black crayon, 19.2 × 15.2 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. (illustration credit 10.23)
Just as he had visited the madhouse in Zaragoza so long ago to jot down material for his paintings of lunatics, so he went to the madhouse in Bordeaux; and from this visit (or visits) came some of his most terrifying images of lunacy, in which the madmen acquire a sullen, titanic power and seem on the verge of bursting their bonds—Prometheuses barely chained. Here, in Album G, is a half-naked madman crawling under the massive arch of another’s legs, as though taking refuge in a cave of flesh (#39). Here is a man Gimiendo y llorando (“Weeping and wailing,” #50), down on his knees on the hard ground in front of a stone wall, his outflung arms reminding us—and Goya too, of course—of the imploring Christ figure who sets off the power train of unbearable memory and foreboding in the first plate of the Desastres de la guerra, and of the pueblo Christ in the white shirt defying the French muskets in the Third of May. Most dreadful of all is the power and malevolence of the madman’s eye in Loco furioso (“Raging lunatic,” #40), an eye swiveling at the shadowy terrors that beset him. Only an old man who had suffered immensely and known every last terror of black melancholy could have imagined and drawn such an eye.
Goya, Bordeaux Album I, 39, Locos (“Madmen”), 1825–28. Black crayon, 19.2 × 14.8 cm. The British Museum, London. (illustration credit 10.24)
Goya, Bordeaux Album I, 50, Gimiendo y llorando (“Weeping and wailing”), 1825–28. Private collection. (illustration credit 10.25)
Goya, Bordeaux Album I, 40, Loco furioso (“Raging lunatic”), 1825–28. Private collection. (illustration credit 10.26)
Goya, Bordeaux Album I, 12, Mal sueño (“Bad dream”), 1825–28. Black crayon, 19.2 × 15.2 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 10.27)
In a lighter vein, there are things in both albums that Goya had seen on the street, in raree-shows, or perhaps at the circus. A donkey walking on its hind legs. A man standing on his head on a platform, waving his legs in the air, semaphoring messages—this primitive but useful code had been in military use for many years, but here (Telégrafo; Album H, #54) Goya observes its comic or parodic aspect. A mild, sweetly bewildered-looking giantess he had noticed among the exhibits at a fair in Bordeaux, towering over her spectators.
And there were the things that had no existence outside Goya’s head, fantasies thrown off by the old laboring brain and its obsessions, perhaps the basis of future Caprichos that he would not live to etch. Some of these look not so much like inventions as transcriptions of dreams and visions that came to
Goya fully formed and without editing. Thus Mal sueño (“Bad dream” or “Talking apparition”), an unnumbered sheet from Album G. A man wrapped in what seems to be a torn cape is gazing in open-mouthed fright at a head. Its eyes are bulging with horror, and it is supported by a dozen blackbirds or starlings, which are pecking at it. Two cats are also looking, with the head and the birds. The man is so appalled by this enigmatic vision that his hair stands on end.
What can this mean? Who can say? It is beyond interpretation. The same is true of Album G’s Cómico descubrimiento (“Comic discovery,” #51), which is anything but comic. A hole has opened in the page: a little gulf, crammed with heads. They are shouting, whispering, squalling, jabbering. You can almost hear their dull incoherent prattle. Is this human paste a vision of hell? A reflection on the mindlessness of crowds, for which Goya had always felt such contempt?
There are more compressed, many-leveled images, such as Album G’s #53: “They fly and fly. Fiesta in the air. The Butterfly Bull.” It is a sketch of a black bull, caught in midleap, with what seems to be a bouquet of faces and butterflies flowering from its back. The idea of a toro mariposa suggests sexual ambiguity—a homosexual bull, a maricón.
If Goya had been younger and stronger, what might such urgently drawn visions have produced? But he was neither young nor strong. In 1825 his doctors diagnosed paralysis of the bladder, and an enormous tumor appeared on the bone of one of his legs. Despite his collapsing health, Goya made up his mind to settle matters once and for all with the court in Madrid. He would sort out the matter of his retirement and his pension. He wrote a memorial to Fernando VII, reminding his sovereign of his age (eighty), his length of service to the Spanish Crown (fifty-three years), and his need of a retirement pension. In June 1826 one of Fernando’s advisers, the duke of Hijar, took up Goya’s cause, reminding the king that “the artist has worked for a long time and with the utmost care, taste, and intelligence on the numerous commissions he has been given; his artistic merit is so unsurpassable that other artists and the general public all extol his work.” Such long service and quality of work deserved a substantial reward; and the king agreed, giving him a pension of 50,000 reales a year and, equally important, permission to keep living in France. In this way Fernando proved that he had no further quarrel with Goya and that he had realized, at last, that the old man posed no menace, not even so much as an inconvenience, to him.
Goya went back to Bordeaux. We do not know the details of the journey, but before he left, he was painted by Fernando’s artist-laureate Vicente López: he appears as a crusty, wrinkled, indomitable old cuss, the daddy of all Spanish artists, but a daddy only just living. In July 1826, he arrived back in the presumably welcoming arms of Leocadia. “Goya is fine,” wrote Moratín.14 “He keeps busy with his sketches, he walks, eats, takes his siestas; it seems that right now peace reigns over his hearth.” Then, quite unexpectedly, Goya took off for Madrid again in the summer of 1827, possibly to finalize the details of his passport—though in fact we know nothing for sure about his reasons for going, and they must have been pressing, given the great discomfort of the journey, its length, and his ever-worsening health. In Madrid, he painted at least one final portrait, that of his grandson Mariano, before pressing on to Bordeaux.
Goya wrote four letters to Javier, all fond, all yearning for the company of his “beloved travelers.” “Everything you tell me in your last letter, which is to say that to spend more time with me they will give up on going to Paris, fills me with the greatest pleasure.… I find myself much better, and I hope to be back where I was before.… I am happy to be better to receive my most beloved travelers. This improvement I owe to Molina, who has told me to dose myself with the herb valerian, ground to a powder.”15
The improvement was an illusion. On April 2, Goya suffered a stroke, which paralyzed the right side of his body. He lingered in a coma, speechless and unresponding, and died two weeks later, at two in the morning on April 16, 1828. Brugada, Molina, and Leocadia were present at his bedside; Brugada supported his head as his breathing grew feebler and less regular. A young lithographer, Francisco de la Torred, drew a record of that deathbed scene, which was printed in a sizeable edition by Gaulon, the firm which had published Goya’s own Bulls of Bordeaux.
Most of Goya’s estate went to Javier, who did not get to Bordeaux in time for his death. Some was left to Mariano. This was under an irrevocable will Goya had made years before in 1811.
He left Leocadia nothing.
Javier, who loathed Leocadia—the feeling seems to have been amply reciprocated—let her take a few orts and leftovers: some furniture, household linen, clothes, and, in case she decided to go back to Spain, the sum of one thousand francs. She had to vacate the house, whose rent was only paid up to the end of April.
She also got one painting, The Milkmaid of Bordeaux, which may or may not have been a portrait of her daughter Rosario, and may or may not have been painted by Goya. A year later, poverty compelled her to sell it to one of Goya’s distant relatives, Juan Bautista de Muguiro, whose descendants gave it to the Prado in 1946.
Goya was buried on the morning of April 17, the day after his death. A Mass was said for the repose of his soul in the nearby Church of Nôtre-Dame, and he was interred in the cemetery of the Chartreuse in Bordeaux beside his son’s father-in-law, Martín Miguel de Goicoechea.
In 1901, not deeming it proper that one of Spain’s greatest sons should lie forever in French soil, the Spanish government asked for his remains to be exhumed and given back for burial in Spanish earth. They were transferred to Madrid in 1901. Then, in 1929, it was decided to rebury Goya under the floor of the church he had so beautifully decorated with his angels, Santa María de la Florida. He was dug up again, but this time his skull was missing. It has never been found, so one can only hope that the souvenir hunter respected it and that it ended up in Spanish, not French, soil.
Goya, La lechera de Burdeos (The Milkmaid of Bordeaux), c. 1827. Oil on canvas, 74 × 68 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 10.28)
NOTES
2 GOYA’S BEGINNINGS
1. Lafuente Ferrari, Antecedentes, p. 25.
2. Cited in ibid., p. 27.
3. Iglesias, “Una historia no lineal de progreso y modernización,” in Ilustración y proyecto liberal, p. 22.
4. Tom Lubbock, in “Holding Their Ground,” catalog essay in Goya: Drawings from His Private Albums (London: Hayward Gallery, 2001), p. 27.
5. On Goya’s posthumous market fortunes in England, see Nigel Glendinning, “Goya and England in the Nineteenth Century,” Burlington Magazine 106 (1964), pp. 4–14; also Tomlinson, Francisco Goya y Lucientes (London, 1994), p. 287.
6. John Russell in introduction to Eugène Delacroix’s diaries. Selected Letters 1823–1863 (New York, 1970), p. 1.
7. Baticle, Goya, pp. 39–40.
8. Baticle, Goya, p. 47.
9. It is painted on a previously used canvas suggests a date toward the end of the War of Independence, probably around 1814, when the shortage of canvas was acute. See Fundación Amigos de Museo del Prado, ed., Goya: La imagen de la mujer, pp. 206–28.
10. Juan Álvarez Mendizabal (1790–1853), Jewish, liberal, and a Mason, was born in Cádiz and became a trusted friend of Rafael de Riego’s. After a sojourn as a banker in London, Mendizabal returned to Spain in 1835 with the almost incredibly radical proposal to defray the country’s national debt of 4.4 billion reales by nationalizing all of the real estate, revenues, and shares belonging to religious communities. Purchasers of these confiscated properties could use either cash or state scrip.
3 COMING TO THE CITY
1. For Esquilache and the motín, see Franco Strazzullo, Il Marchese di Squillace. Leopoldo de Gregorio ministro al Carlo di Borbone (Naples, 1997).
2. Campomanes, letter IV in Cartas político-económicas, cited in Díaz-Plaja, La vida española en el siglo XVIII, p. 19.
3. Fernán-Núñez, Conde de, Vida de Carlos III (Madrid, 1
898), p. 38.
4. Abbé Vayrac, État présent de l’Espagne (Amsterdam, 1731), vol. 2, p. 237.
5. Cited in Kamen, Spanish Inquisition, p. 308.
6. Ibid., p. 16.
7. Ibid., p. 191.
8. Díaz-Plaja, La vida española, pp. 111 ff.
9. Keith Christiansen, catalog to Giambattista Tiepolo: Modelli, Capricci and Prints (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996), entry #53, p. 325.
10. L. F. de Moratín, La comedia nueva, ed. John Dowling (Madrid, 1970), pp. 291–2; cited in J. Dowling, Ramón de la Cruz, Sainetes I (Classica Castalia, 1981), pp. 24–5.
11. Ibid., p. 26.
12. Duro, Historia de Zamora, cited in Díaz-Plaja, La vida española, p. 149.
13. Goya, MS letters to Zapater, July 7, 1786, #108, p. 209.
4 FROM TAPESTRY TO SILENCE
1. Held, “Los cartones para tapices,” Fundación Amigos del Museo del Prado, ed., Goya (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg/Círculo de Lectores, 2002), p. 36.
2. Ford, Gatherings, pp. 165–6.
3. Klingender, Goya in the Democratic Tradition, p. 84.
4. See Margarita Moreno de las Heras, “The Wounded Mason,” note to cat. #13, Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment, pp. 29–30.
5. See Tomlinson, Francisco Goya y Lucientes, pp. 30 ff.