style="font-size:15px;"> oil on canvas, 207 × 126 cm
Museo del Prado, Madrid
The King granted the artist several extensions of his French vacation and in May 1826 Goya, aged eighty, returned to Madrid in order to request that the king allow him to retire while continuing to pay his pension. Ferdinand agreed and Goya returned to Bordeaux where he died two years later, on April 16, 1828. Goya’s skill as a portrait painter lay in his ability to capture something of the personality of the sitter, more than to simply record an accurate likeness.
The Swing
1787
oil on canvas, 169 × 100 cm
Duke of Montellano collection, Madrid
He became celebrated as a portraitist relatively early in his career, and royal patronage ensured a steady stream of commissions.
More than 200 of his portraits are extant, and they offer for posterity of Spanish society at the time. Goya recorded three successive kings and their families, their courtiers and many Spanish aristocrats for posterity.
A Village Procession
1787
oil on canvas, 169 × 137 cm
private collection
He also painted political potentates – among them statesmen, liberal thinkers and army officers who helped to mould Spanish history – and he painted his friends and associates. Goya greatly admired the paintings of Diego Velázquez (1599–1660).
In 1774, he was asked to design tapestry drawings for the future King Charles IV, giving him the opportunity of studying Velázquez’s masterpieces in the royal collections.
Highwaymen Attacking a Coach
1787
oil on canvas, 169 × 137 cm
private collection
Four years later, Goya printed eleven engravings after Velázquez, the first copies of Velázquez’s works to be made. Including himself as artist in the picture was a device that Goya was to adopt and to use often as Velázquez did in Las Meninas. More than a century after Velázquez’s death, Goya stepped into the master’s shoes as the leading portraitist of the Spanish court. When he was first appointed official court painter in 1786, Charles III was on the throne.
The Meadow of San Isidro
1788
oil on canvas, 44 × 94 cm
Museo del Prado, Madrid
Charles, a hard-working and enlightened monarch, devoted himself to reforming a country that had scarcely moved out of the Middle Ages.
Goya’s less flattering Portrait of Charles III in Hunting Costume of 1787 is of a man renowned for his ugliness. Charles III respected tradition, but at the same time encouraged the cult of liberty, welcoming the ideas of the French Enlightenment as they filtered into Spain.
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