Goya: The Portraits at the National Gallery

Goya: The Portraits at the National Gallery is the show of the decade

Credit: Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid/Goya

Francisco Goya was the greatest Spanish painter of the 18th and early 19th century, a man whose extraordinary works depicted everything from royalty – he was court painter – to major historical events, to the artist's personal nightmares. His technique influenced generations of artists, among them Manet and Picasso.
Next week, the National Gallery unveils the exhibition of the year: a show devoted to Goya's portraiture, consisting of 70 paintings on loan from across the world. This is arguably the most exciting temporary display at the gallery since the one devoted to Goya's great Spanish predecessor Diego Velázquez in 2006. Here our critic gives an exclusive preview of the exhibition.
The walls of the National Gallery's S

Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) and the Spanish Enlightenment

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) is regarded as the most important Spanish artist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Over the course of his long career, Goya moved from jolly and lighthearted to deeply pessimistic and searching in his paintings, drawings, etchings, and frescoes. Born in Fuendetodos, he later moved with his parents to Saragossa and, at age fourteen, began studying with the painter José Luzán Martínez (1710–1785). In 1746, the year of Goya's birth, the Spanish crown was under the rule of Ferdinand VI. Subsequently, the Bourbon king Charles III (r. 1759–88) ruled the country as an enlightened monarch sympathetic to change, employing ministers who supported radical economic, industrial, and agricultural reform. Goya came to artistic maturity during this age of enlightenment. In Madrid, the painter brothers Francisco (1734–1795) and Ramón Bayeu y Subías (1746–1793) had set up shop in 1763 and Goya soon joined their studio, eventually marrying their sister Josefa. He visited Italy in 1770, after two failed attempts in drawing competitions at the Real Academia des Bellas Artes in San Fernando.

 http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/