Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, born on 30 March 1746 in Fuendetodos, a village in Aragon, and died on 16 April 1828 in Bordeaux, is one of those rare painters whose work makes biography indispensable, and whose biography makes the work more unsettling still. A Spanish court painter who became deaf at 47, a witness to the Napoleonic Wars, a political exile at 78: every painting by Goya bears the mark of a life lived under pressure.
On VMuseum, I have selected four of his works to trace these successive transformations, from the decorative and ambitious court painter to the dark visionary whom the Expressionists would claim as a forerunner a century later.
A Young Painter Who Observes: Boy on a Ram (1786-1787)
Boy on a Ram, held at the Museo del Prado, belongs to the series of tapestry cartoons commissioned by the Duke of Osuna. Goya is 40 years old. He has already been court painter for a year, and an academician for six. The career he had patiently built since his two failed entries to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Madrid (1763, 1766) and his formative journey to Italy (1770-1771) is now bearing fruit.
This light genre scene, a child perched on an animal in a luminous landscape, nonetheless says something beyond the decorative commission it was. The brushwork is already free, the observation direct, the palette far removed from the dark Baroque style in which Goya had been trained. What he retained from Italy was less the influence of the great masters than the lesson of Velázquez, whom he would study systematically from 1778 onward: observe, do not idealise.
This Madrid period also saw his marriage to Josefa Bayeu (1773), sister-in-law of his mentor Francisco Bayeu, and a rapid social ascent that would culminate in the title of Painter to the King’s Chamber under Charles IV in 1789.
The Psychological Portrait Painter: Portrait of José Costa y Bonells (c. 1810)
Portrait of José Costa y Bonells, known as Pepito was painted around 1810, in the midst of the Spanish War of Independence against the Napoleonic armies. By this point, Goya had endured the central ordeal of his life: in 1793, a serious illness whose causes remain debated among medical historians (lead poisoning, viral encephalitis, Susac syndrome) left him permanently deaf.
This deafness did not diminish his gaze. It concentrated it. Young Pepito, the son of a family friend, is rendered with an almost adult self-assurance against a neutral background that owes everything to Velázquez. No narrative props, no flattering setting: only a gaze, a posture, a presence. This is precisely what Édouard Manet would absorb when he studied Goya during his Spanish journey of 1865, and which resonates in The Fifer and The Execution of Maximilian.
1810 is also the year in which Goya began The Disasters of War, a suite of 82 prints documenting the atrocities of the guerrilla conflict, which would not be published until 1863, thirty-five years after his death. The delicate portrait painter and the unflinching chronicler are one and the same man.
Narrative Tension: El Maragato Threatening Friar Pedro (c. 1806)
El Maragato Threatening Friar Pedro de Zaldivia with His Own Gun, held at the Art Institute of Chicago, is part of a series of six small scenes on copper panel recounting a well-known episode from contemporary Spain: a Franciscan friar disarming a notorious bandit. Intimate in format, tightly composed, the movement suspended at the most charged moment of the action.
This work illustrates a capacity in Goya that chronological biography often obscures: he was also a narrative painter, able to concentrate an entire drama into a minimal space. The scene predates The Disasters of War by a few years and shares its narrative economy: no heroic rhetoric, simply two men and the instant when everything turns.
It is during this period (1800-1814) that Goya also painted The Family of Charles IV (1800), a group portrait of unsettling psychological realism, and the two Majas, which would bring him before the Spanish Inquisition in 1815. The same refusal of embellishment runs through all of it.
Late Serenity: The Vintage (Autumn) (1786) and the Arc of a Life
The Vintage (Autumn), held at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, belongs to the same decorative vein as Boy on a Ram. Placing it here, at the close, is deliberate: it allows us to appreciate how fragile the luminous quality of the Madrid years would prove against what came next.
Between 1819 and 1823, in his country house known as the Quinta del Sordo (the Deaf Man’s Villa), Goya painted directly onto the walls fourteen compositions that posterity would call the Black Paintings. Saturn Devouring His Son, The Dog, Witches’ Sabbath: these works, transferred to canvas in 1874 by Baron d’Erlanger and today in the Prado, were never intended to be seen by others. They were painted for himself.
In 1824, faced with the absolutist repression of Ferdinand VII, Goya went into exile in Bordeaux at the age of 78. There he mastered lithography, produced The Bulls of Bordeaux, and filled sketchbooks with drawings. The Milkmaid of Bordeaux (1825-1827), his last major canvas, is of an unexpected tenderness after the dark years. He died on 16 April 1828. His remains now rest in the church of San Antonio de la Florida in Madrid, beneath the revolutionary frescoes he had painted there in 1798.
Eugène Delacroix, Rembrandt whom Goya cited as a master, Vincent van Gogh: artists whose work resonates deeply with Goya’s trajectory, and whom VMuseum invites you to explore.
Frequently Asked Questions about Goya
Why is Goya considered a precursor of modern art?
Because he was the first major Western painter to depict historical violence without heroisation, to explore the unconscious as a legitimate subject, and to develop a freedom of brushwork that surpassed academic convention. His work anticipates Romanticism, Expressionism and Surrealism.
Why did Goya become deaf?
In 1793, a serious illness left him permanently deaf at the age of 47. The causes remain debated: lead poisoning from paint pigments, viral encephalitis, or Susac syndrome according to more recent studies. This deafness profoundly altered his relationship with the world and with painting.
What are Goya’s most famous works?
The Black Paintings (including Saturn Devouring His Son), the print series Los Caprichos and The Disasters of War, the two Majas, and the 1814 canvases The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808, all held at the Museo del Prado in Madrid.
Where are the Black Paintings held?
At the Museo del Prado in Madrid. Painted directly onto the walls of the Quinta del Sordo between 1819 and 1823, they were transferred to canvas in 1874 by Baron Frédéric d’Erlanger, who donated them to the Prado in 1881.
What is the connection between Goya and Manet?
Manet visited Spain in 1865 and studied Goya at the Prado. The influence is clearly visible in The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, which draws directly on the frontal composition of The Third of May. Discover Manet’s biography on VMuseum.
To go further
Explore all our analyses of Goya’s works with high-resolution images and detailed notes here.
Methodological note: this biography draws on available primary sources (Goya-Zapater correspondence, records of the Academia de San Fernando) and on the historiographical work of Juliet Wilson-Bareau, Manuela Mena and Nigel Glendinning. The work analyses link to the individual entries available on VMuseum.
