Francisco goya biography summary templates
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Francisco Josè de Goya y Lucientes (Fig. 1) was a painter endowed with a great expressive capacity. His work, which was carried out between the end of the Seventeenth and the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, covered a period of more than 60 years, with a massive production, a wide range of subjects and numerous techniques, clearly eclectic. Oil paintings, etchings, drawings, lithographs were produced with such intensity which would appear not to have ever completely satisfied the artist’s ambitions.
Fig. 1. Self portrait.
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Goya’s works would appear to have been produced in two periods: the first, in which the artist was proving his value, a period which included the tapestries and portraits: the second, that devoted to expressive liberty, which is characterised by a varied production of Works of Art ranging from Caprichos to the Majas, the Disasters of War, Black paintings to the Bull fights. This second period – according to
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Francisco José dem 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 Zaragoza 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 oss. 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 (1744–1793) had set up shop in 1763, and Goya soon joined their studio, eventually mar
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Summary of Francisco Goya
Goya occupies a unique position within the history of Western art, and is often cited as both an Old Master and the first truly modern artist. His art embodies Romanticism's emphasis on subjectivity, imagination, and emotion, characteristics reflected most notably in his prints and later private paintings. At the same time, Goya was an astute observer of the world around him, and his art responded directly to the tumultuous events of his day, from the liberations of the Enlightenment, to the suppressions of the Inquisition, to the horrors of war following the Napoleonic invasion. Both for its inventiveness and its political engagement, Goya's art had an enormous impact on later modern artists. His unflinching scenes from the Peninsular War presaged the works of Pablo Picasso in the 20th century, while his exploration of bizarre and dreamlike subjects in the Caprichos laid the foundation for Surrealists like Salvador Dalí. Goya's influence extends to th