From light into darkness: the genius of Goya

The great Spanish artist Francisco Goya was born in Zaragoza in 1746, the son of a gilder whose livelihood was doomed by the new fashion for marble. The young Goya first studied in his home town before graduating to Madrid, rising through academy and court circles and navigating his way through the reigns of three Bourbon kings and the intervening rule of Joseph Bonaparte before retiring to Bordeaux in his late seventies.

From early commissions for religious frescoes, altarpieces and tapestry cartoons for royal palaces, he went on to paint celebrations of everyday Spain en fête and to establish a portrait practice encompassing all the leading figures of the wildly fluctuating political scene in the capital.

As his fortunes rose, his creativity broadened in both technique and subject matter. Drawing and painting were supplemented by etching, lithography and miniature-painting, light-hearted social scenes joined by reflections of a very different kind. Goya the successful courtier became the witness for all time to the savagery and inhumanity visited on Spain by years of war and destitution.

It is a complex story that Janis Tomlinson has to tell, but the armature for Goya’s life is provided by an astonishing wealth of scholarship. Though a raft of letters from Goya to his close friend Martin Zapater gives us the artist’s own voice, to the nth degree, she has brought to bear accounts of every real Goya spent, earned or was owed, every investment made, property bought and advertisement placed, every letter, will, contract, diary entry or official paperto tell this life with a meticulous attention to detail.

Tomlinson rather engagingly reveals that she was advised to ‘lighten up’ in her approach; but if all this detail sometimes threatens to swamp the narrative line, it establishes an air of authority ultimately impossible to resist.