The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (201 page)

(1746–1828).
Spanish painter and graphic artist. He was the most powerful and original European artist of his time, but his genius was slow in maturing and he was well into his thirties before he began producing work that set him apart from his contemporaries. Born at Fuendetodos in Aragon, the son of a gilder, he served his apprenticeship at Saragossa, then appears to have worked at Madrid for the court painter Francisco
Bayeu
. In about 1770 he went to Italy but he was back in Saragossa the next year. In 1773 he married Bayeu's sister, and by 1775 had settled at Madrid. Bayeu secured him employment making
cartoons
for the royal tapestry factory, and this took up most of his working time from 1775 to 1792. He made sixty-three cartoons (Prado, Madrid), the largest more than 6 m. wide. The subjects range from idyllic scenes to realistic incidents of everyday life, conceived throughout in a gay and romantic spirit and executed with
Rococo
decorative charm. During these years Goya also found time for portraits and religious works, and his status grew. He was elected to the Academy of San Fernando in 1780 and became assistant director of painting in 1785. In 1789 he was nominated a court painter to the new king, Charles IV. A more important turning-point in his career than any of these appointments, however, was the mysterious and traumatic illness he experienced in 1792. It left him stone deaf, and while convalescing in 1793 he painted a series of small pictures of ‘fantasy and invention’ in order, as he said, ‘to occupy an imagination mortified by the contemplation of my sufferings’. This marks the beginning of his preoccupation with the morbid, bizarre, and menacing that was to be such a feature of his mature work. It was given vivid expression in the first of his great series of engravings,
Los Caprichos
(Caprices), issued in 1799. The set (executed
c.
1793–8) consists of eighty-two plates in
etching
reinforced with
aquatint
, and their humour is constantly overshadowed by an element of nightmare. Technically revealing the influence of
Rembrandt
, they feature savagely satirical attacks on social customs and abuses of the Church, with elements of the macabre in scenes of witchcraft and diabolism.
In 1795 Goya succeeded Bayeu as director of painting at the Academy of San Fernando and in 1799 he was appointed First Court Painter, producing his most famous portrait group, the
Family of Charles IV
(Prado), in the following year. The weaknesses of the royal family are revealed with unsparing realism, though evidently without deliberate satirical intent. Goya's early portraits had followed the manner of
Mengs
, but stimulated by the study of
Velázquez's
paintings in the royal collection he had developed a much more natural, lively, and personal style, showing increasing mastery of pose and expression, heightened by dramatic contrasts of light and shade. From about the same date as the royal group portrait are the celebrated pair of paintings the
Clothed Maja and Naked Maja
(Prado), whose erotic nature led Goya to be summoned before the Inquisition. Popular legend has it that they represent the Duchess of Alba, the beautiful widow whose relationship with Goya caused scandal in Madrid. Goya retained his appointment of court painter under Joseph Buonaparte during the French occupation of Spain (1808–14), but his activity as a painter of court and society decreased, and he was torn between his welcome for the regime as a liberal and his abhorrence as a patriot against foreign military rule. After the restoration of Ferdinand VII in 1814 Goya was exonerated from the charge of having ‘accepted employment from the usurper’ by claiming he had not worn the medal awarded him by the French, and he painted for the king the two famous scenes of the bloody uprising of the citizens of Madrid against the occupying forces—
The Second of May
, 1808 and
The Third of May
, 1808 (Prado). Equally dramatic, and even more savage and macabre, are the sixty-five etchings
Los Desastres de la Guerra
(The Disasters of War, 1810–14)—nightmare scenes, depicting atrocities committed by both French and Spanish.
Goya virtually retired from public life after 1815, working for himself and friends. He kept the title of court painter but was superseded in royal favour by Vicente
López
. Towards the end of 1819 he fell seriously ill for the second time (a remarkable self-portrait in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts shows him with the doctor who nursed him). He had just bought a country house in the outskirts of Madrid, the Quinta del Sordo (House of the Deaf Man); and it was here after his recovery in 1820 that he executed fourteen large murals, sometimes known as the
Black Paintings
, now in the Prado. Painted almost entirely in blacks, greys, and browns, they depict horrific scenes, such as
Saturn Devouring One of His Sons
, executed with an almost ferocious intensity and freedom of handling. In 1824 Goya obtained permission from Ferdinand VII to leave the country for reasons of health and settled at Bordeaux. He made two brief visits to Spain, on the first of which (1826) he officially resigned as court painter. In these last years he took up the new medium of
lithography
(in his series the
Bulls of Bordeaux
), while his paintings illustrate his progress towards a style which foreshadowed that of the
Impressionists
.
Goya completed some 500 oil paintings and murals, about 300 etchings and lithographs, and many hundreds of drawings. He was exceptionally versatile and his work expresses a very wide range of emotion. His technical freedom and originality likewise are remarkable—his frescos in San Antonio de la Florida in Madrid (1798), for example, were evidently executed with sponges. In his own day he was chiefly celebrated for his portraits, of which he painted more than 200; but his fame now rests equally on his other work.

 
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(1596–1656).
Dutch painter, one of the foremost pioneers of realistic landscape painting in the Netherlands. His earliest works are heavily indebted to his master Esaias van de
Velde
, but he then created a distinctive type of monochrome landscape in browns and greys with touches of vivid blue or red to catch the eye; gnarled oaks; wide plains, usually seen from a height; low horizons and clouded skies. He was one of the first painters to capture the quality of the light and air in a scene and to suggest the movement of clouds. Most of his paintings seem to be based on drawings made as he travelled about the countryside, and he evidently used the same drawings again and again because the same motifs recur repeatedly in his works. His finest work has a sense of poetic calm as well as great freshness and luminosity of atmosphere. Van Goyen worked in his native Leiden, Haarlem, and The Hague, where he died. He was hugely prolific and had many pupils and imitators. With Salomon van
Ruysdael
, whose paintings are often virtually indistinguishable from his, he was the outstanding master of the ‘tonal’ phase of Dutch landscape painting, when the depiction of atmosphere was the artist's prime concern.

 
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(
c.
1421–97).
Florentine painter. Originally trained as a goldsmith, he worked in his early years with
Ghiberti
on the doors of the Baptistery in Florence, but he is mentioned as a painter in 1444 and subsequently became Fra
Angelico's
assistant in Rome and Orvieto. His reputation rests on only one work—but one of the most enchanting in all Italian
Renaissance
art: the decoration of the chapel of the Palazzo
Medici
in Florence with frescos of
The Journey of the Magi
(1459–61). This is the most glittering fresco cycle of the century, recalling, and perhaps consciously rivalling,
Gentile da Fabriano's
Adoration of the Magi
of 1423. Its secular outlook is far removed in spirit from the work of his master Fra Angelico. The rest of Benozzo's career was undistinguished. His other major work was a large fresco cycle of Old Testament scenes in the Campo Santo in Pisa; he began work on it in 1467 and spent most of the rest of his life in Pisa. The frescos were badly damaged by bombing in the Second World War. Benozzo also painted altarpieces, one of which (
Madonna and Child with Saints
, 1461–2) is in the National Gallery, London.

 
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