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Francisco Goya, considered to be “the Father of Modern Art,” began his painting career just after the late Baroque period. In expressing his thoughts and feelings frankly, as he did, he became the pioneer of new artistic tendencies which were to come to fruition in the nineteenth century. Two trends dominated the art of his contradictory; they actually were not. Together they represented the reaction against previous conceptions of art and the desire for a new form of expression. In order to understand the scope of Goya’s art, and to appreciate the principles which governed his development and tremendous versatility, it is essential to realize that his work extended over a period of more than sixty years, for he continued to draw and paint until he was eighty two years old.
The importance of this factor is evident between his attitude towards life in his youth, when he accepted the world as it was quite happily, in his manhood when he began to criticize it, and in his old age when he became embittered and disillusioned with people and society. Furthermore, the world changed completely during his lifetime. The society, in which he had achieved a great success disappeared during the Napoleonic war. Long before the end of the eighteenth century Goya had already turned towards his new ideals and expressed then in his graphic art and in his paintings.
As an artist, Goya was temperament far removed from the classicals. In a few works he approached Classical style, but in the greater part of his work the Romantic triumphed.
Born in Zaragoza, Spain, he found employment as a young teenager under the mediocre artist Jose’ Luzan, from whom he learned to draw and as was customary, copied the prints of several masters.
At the age of seventeen he went to Madrid. Two painters who were working there, the last of the great Venetian painters-Tiepolo and the rather cold and efficient neo-classical painter- Antonio Raphael Mengs...