Goya, we are reminded, was a revolutionary; he was also a pitiless, if quizzical, onlooker at the life of the Madrid Court. It was a simple matter to him to transfer his allegiance from the Bourbons to Joseph Buonaparte, and it was even more simple to welcome Ferdinand VII. to the throne. ‘What did such changes matter in years of irretrievable ruin?’ writes C. Gasquoine Hartley, in _A Record of Spanish Painting_. The question may be left for the individual to answer according to his own fancy. And if Goya was, as some will find, an opportunist, a political weathercock, and a moral Vicar of Bray, as an artist he was a great reformative force. Alternately an idealist and a realist, he fought with all the social forces and against the academic standards of the school commanded by David and Mengs, destroying the debased conventions of painting and freeing the brush from the domination of a clique. A national artist _par excellence_, he gave lasting form to the sentiments, customs and conditions of his country. A profound believer in empiricism, a great humourist, sometimes impetuous and fantastic, at other times holding fast to reality; a master of portraiture; fantastic, inspired, spontaneous in his aquafortis etchings; he seized upon and immortalised every aspect of the gruesome tragi-comedy which was played in Spain in the last years of the eighteenth century. Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was born at the end of March (the 30th or 31st) 1746 at Fuentetodos near Zaragoza, in Aragon, the province which gave to the nation poets like the ‘Spanish Horaces,’ historians like Zurita, teachers like Gracián and Luzán, a scholar like Latassa, and a statesman like the Conde de Aranda. Goya was baptized in the Church of Our Lady of the Ascent, and the names given him by his godmother, Francesca de Grasa, were Francis Joseph. The amiable weakness for connecting great men with great families has prompted a German biographer to claim that both his father and mother belonged to the nobility, and that his first patron was the Duque de Fuentes. Less imaginative authorities, however, tell us that his parents, José Goya and Gracia Lucientes, were poor but hardworking peasants, and that when ‘the regenerator of the Spanish school of naturalistic painters’--to quote the prefatory note to Goya’s pictures in the Prado catalogue--had completed his course of elementary instruction at the hands of the village schoolmaster, he was put to agriculture. A fortunate accident revealed the bent of the lad’s genius and liberated him, at the age of fourteen, from the drudgery of manual labour.