Playful, Energetic, Empathetic—Can It Really Begoya? This Remarkable Exhibition Explores the Spanish Master Via the Everyday Peopleheknew Andloved,Saysnancy Durrant

Source: The Times {Saturday Review} Edition: Country: UK Date: Saturday 26, September 2015 Page: 10,11 Area: 1752 sq. cm Circulation: ABC 392483 Daily Ad data: page rate £16,645.00, scc rate £75.00 Phone: 020 7782 5000 Keyword: Goya

Playful, energetic, empathetic—can it really beGoya? This remarkable exhibition explores the Spanish master via the everyday peopleheknew andloved,saysNancy Durrant

round agallery within our modern view of the painter as a the Museo del Prado, gloomy, tormented satirist; a sort of Madrid, hang 14 Spanish Hogarth, forever churning paintings that in the out savage critiques of the troubled 19th century adorned society heinhabited. Athe walls of the Visitors to Goya: The Portraits at Quinta del Sordo the National Gallery, however, will (Villa of the Deaf Man) on the meet a very different man. This is the outskirtsofthecity.Thehouse,which first exhibition to concentrate on the no longer exists but was then artist’s portraits — of kings and surrounded by fields, belonged to queens, artists and thinkers, dukes and Francisco de Goya, who had lost his despots, friends and family, ladies, hearing after a near-fatal illness in liberals and little children — and spans his 1792. He painted the works directly entire career in the form. It tells the story onto the walls of his dining and living ofaGoya most of us don’t know: playful, rooms between 1819-23, with no experimental, energetic and empathetic intention of public display. These “Black — a man of the Enlightenment but one Paintings” are deeply disturbing — the who managed to negotiate the tricky and most famous is Saturn Devouringhis Son, dangerous politics of an age that took in and subjects range from a witches’ sabbath the French Revolution, the Napoleonic to a desperate cudgel fight, as well as two Wars, the fall of the Holy Roman Empire hideous old men eating soup — and are and the brutal return of absolute limited to a dark, ominous palette. Standing monarchy to Spain. among them is unsettling enough; God The show, which has been nearlya (and Goya) only knows what it was like decade in gestation, includes some having dinner with them on the walls. spectacular loans. Ten works are coming from the Prado, and others from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York These works loom unreasonably large — (such as The Countess of Altamira and her along withhis prints series Los Caprichos, daughter, María Agustina, which has never The Disasters of War, and private albums been lent internationally) and the such asThe Witches and OldWomen—in dll(hlk

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Meadows Museum in Dallas (the last work to flatter that makes you wonder why Goya painted, of his only, much-loved and certain people persisted in commissioning rather spoilt grandson Mariano), as well as him (María Luisa for one, whose once- from the Museo Goya in Zaragoza. There famous looks were visibly ruined by are a number of self-portraits, rarely lent, 22 pregnancies, though she considered while the painting of Don Valentin Bellvís herself a beauty to the end); third, an de Moncada y Pizarro from the Fondo unconventional informality that served Cultural Villar Mir in Madrid has never further to humanise his subjects. been seen in public before. With Floridablanca, Goya creates a Another coup comes in the form of the credible narrative that cheekily puts the superbly haughty 1797 portrait of Goya’s painter in the frame with his sitter. The friend and patron the Duchess of Alba, count is shown in his study, poring over the from the Hispanic Society of America in plans for the Aragon Canal with an aide, at New York — a painting that has only once the moment of being interrupted by the left its owners in the United States. And artist, who has a sketch to show him. The last month thegallery announced the last- painting depicts Floridablanca as a hard- minute inclusion of a pair of pendant working reformist (the building of the portraits of King Charles IV in hunting canal facilitated trade to Aragon, Goya’s dress and his Queen María Luisa from home province) and as a patron of the arts. 1799. Loanedbythe Patrimonio Nacional Even without that background,itclearly inMadrid,this is onlythe second time they shows a real man in his real, messy office, have left Spain. No wonder no one has surprised but benevolent, even if Goya’s attempted an exhibition of Goya’s representation is a bit wooden. This early portraits before. stiffness didn’t last long. Goya was a Although portraits account for about a third of his painted output and more than superlative observer of nature and proud 150 survive (about 70 are in this show), of his originality. He relished the challenge Goya came to portraiture quite late. Born of painting figures in new positions. It was also in his interest to develop the in the village of Fuendetodos, near naturalism of his painting — his ambition Zaragoza, in 1746, he studied alongside the was to become first court painter to the painter Francisco Bayeu, marrying king, a position not held by a Spaniard Bayeu’s sister Josefa (Goya called her since Velázquez in the court of Philip IV. Pepa) when he was 27. The two painters According to his only surviving child, had a friendly but tetchy rivalry. It was, Javier, Goya once said that his only however, another decade before Goya got teachers were Velázquez, Rembrandt and his first portrait commission, in 1783, from Nature herself. He took Velázquez — who the Count of Floridablanca; he had was being freshly acclaimed for his recentlyasked Goya and Bayeu to create naturalism and realism — as his model. altarpieces for the newly built church of Nowhere is that master’s influence San Francisco el Grande in Madrid (then clearer than in another of Goya’s early an architectural symphony of neoclassical portraits, The Family of the Infante Don austerity, now an eye-popping rave Luis. Luis, the king’s younger brother, had anthem of gaudy colour due to excessive been destined for the church, but his decoration added in the 19th century). enormous appetite for fast women meant The portrait, though rather stiff, lays out he gave up his position as Archbishop of Goya’s intentions to do something Seville at the age of 26. After an incident different. Portraiture had developed involving the secretion of prostitutes at during the Renaissance to be a tool of fame convenient spots in thewoodswhile out for the sitter. It required an idealised hunting, he was ordered by the king to likeness, laden with signifiers of status and marry and to go into exile at Arenas de San allegiance, emphasising power for men, Pedro, 80-odd miles from Madrid. beauty for women and wealth for both. Goya’s 1783-84 portrait of the 56-year- The difference with Goya was threefold. old infante’s family evokes Velázquez’s Las First, a shiftof emphasis from outward Meninas,intheway Goya again inserts himself into the picture, in which Luis’s trappings to the inner character of the much younger wife, Maria Teresa, is sitter; second, a verisimilitude and refusal having her hair done. It is a combination of fl h k d h df l

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ceremony and informality — a capturing since shewasachild. Goya retains of a (fictitious) moment; the closest something of that child in her face. servants mill around, Luis’s young Contrast this with Goya’s 1814-15 daughter is intrigued by the painter’s portrait of the Spanish king, Ferdinand daubings. And yet, it is entirely Goya’s VII. Only a year before, Ferdinand had picture. Each figure is a real character returned from his imprisonment under operating within their mental ecosystem. Napoleon and promptly overturned the This psychological insight is what marks constitution, arrested the liberals responsible for it and restored absolute Goya out from his peers, according to monarchy. Thoughhis return hadbeen Xavier Bray, the show’s curator. He admits called for by the people of Spain, he turned that Goya was not the first painter to out to be a brutal and repressive ruler — a accomplish it: “I think Velázquez, you decade later his tyranny would cause Goya could argue, is one for psychology; to commit himself to exile in Bordeaux, Holbein; Van Dyke less so, but Dürer and where he eventually died aged 82. Rembrandt. I think Rembrandt is an equal Goya painted Ferdinand several times, to Goya.” As an illustration, he compares and you dowonder how he kept his job as Goya with Lucian Freud: “With Freud you first court painter, a role to which he had don’t get [that insight], there’s so much finally ascended in 1799. His Ferdinand, in about Freud in his portraits. You feel he’s full royal regalia, swamped in gold and treating that person like a piece of meat. ermine, is a beetle-browed bruiser. His With Goya there’s sympathy, empathy.I great ham fist clumsily grips the sceptre, think he’sa kind man. He does judge but he making it look more like a stick to beat the doesn’t condemn in one go.” people than a symbol of sovereignty, and Two paintings in theexhibition clearly his body is strangely twisted, his great show this acuity (and in one case, chain of office badly off-centre. He looks judgment). Goyaoftenstayed in touch with like a thug in a bedspread. It seems his sitters for manyyears and his portrait of perfectly clear what Goya thought of him. theMarchionessofSantaCruz,from1805,is How Ferdinand didn’t clap the painter in a case in point. He had painted her, a tiny, chains is beyond me. Bray says he has a simple ambition for this show. “I want [visitors] to love Goya as How did Goyakeep a painter,” he says, “and to get to know him in a completely different way — through his court job? His the peoplethat he knew, loved,andhad an affection and respect for.” This roll call of Ferdinand looks like real, living, breathing peopleshould tell athug in a bedspread that story eloquently. Goya: The Portraits is at the National Gallery, London WC2 (0800 9126958), wide-eyed girl of four, with her siblings and from Oct 7 to Jan10 her parents, the Duke and Duchess of Osuna, in 1788 in a beautiful, informal work that highlighted the couple’s then-radical parenting (the duchess adhered to Enlightenment ideas of bringing up your children yourself) and the easy affection within the family. The later portrait shows theravishingly lovely marchioness, a great patron of the arts, as one of the muses (her husband became the Prado’s first director). Opulent though the image is — and frankly quite sexy — Goya’s depiction of the

marchioness’s glorious figure through the clingy fabric of her dress suggests this was painted with her husband in mind. She is evidently very comfortable with the man before her; she has known him, after all, hhldG

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Self Portrait, 1795-97. Below: Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuýigam 1788, on loan from the Met, New York

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The Duke and Duchess of Osuna and their children, 1788. Below: The dukeandduchess’s daughter, the Marchioness of Santa Cruz, 1805

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Goya’s 1797 portrait of the Duchess of Alba, on loan from the Hispanic Society of New York. Right: Ferdinand VII, 1814, after the king’s restoration to the throne

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Goya was a superlative observer of nature and took Diego Velázquez as his model