Artist Biography
1746 – 1828
Nationality
Spain
Movement
Painter, Printmaker, and Draughtsman
Period
Baroque; Rococo; Romanticism; precursor to Realism, Expressionism, and Surrealism
Works in archive
53 artworks
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was a Spanish painter and printmaker. Goya was a court painter to the Spanish Crown and a chronicler of history. He has been regarded both as the last of the Old Masters, referring to those painters prior to 1800 who not only displayed great skill, but were also the head of a local artists' guild, and as the first of the moderns from Romanticism on. His work was truly revolutionary in its implications. The subversive and subjective element in his art, as well as his bold handling of paint, provided a technical model for the work of later generations of artists, notably Manet and Picasso. Goya's career spanned more than sixty years and encompassed the full arc of his civilization's history from Baroque court culture to Napoleonic invasion to the reactionary tyranny of Ferdinand VII's restored monarchy. He was the only painter in the history of Western art to serve simultaneously as an instrument of that civilization — its official court portraitist, its flatterer of kings and queens — and as its most devastating and far-sighted critic. No other artist has inhabited the contradiction between public function and private vision so completely, or translated it into work of such enduring power.
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