The vigour and fire which Gautier finds in this picture is to be observed in varying degree in all Goya’s works. These qualities were the results of his temperament, which moved him to fling his ideas upon the canvas before they could escape him, and imbued him with a constant desire to be rid of them and at work on something else. ‘His whole art,’ says Muther, ‘seems like a bull-fight; for everywhere he sees before him some red rag, and hurls himself upon it with the fury of the toro.’ Nor did his sitters escape the consequences of his impetuosity. Many of his portraits were painted in a day, but the sitting lasted not a few hours merely but the whole of the day, during which time, Mr. Rothenstein tells us, ‘Goya, inexorable towards his model, worked in absolute silence with extraordinary concentration and vigour.’ The same writer relates, as an example of his nervousness and irritability in his studio, the story that the Duke of Wellington so exasperated Goya while he was painting his portrait by passing comments upon his work while the picture was in progress, that he took a sword from the wall and forced his noble sitter to beat a retreat from his studio. Other authorities state that it was with a pair of pistols that he put the English Duke to flight. After all, the weapon is not a material point in the story. A man who worked at this pressure might be expected to develop a tendency to scamp his work, but while many of Goya’s compositions are mere sketches, they are all finished according to his theory that ‘a picture is finished when its effect is true.’ The many compositions Goya executed for the Countess of Benavente, until recently at the Alameda Palace, comprised the most representative exhibition of Goya’s genius. The collection included many pictures painted with exceptional delicacy. The most important of these pictures, the Romeria de San Isidro, is a wonderful canvas containing a mass of details which astonish by their clearness and finish. The ‘Coach attacked by Brigands’ is one example among many of his skill in catching an instantaneous motion and transfixing it upon the canvas. Among the Alameda paintings are some repetitions of the designs for the tapestry factory. The exuberant gaiety in these pictures is in amazing contrast with the ‘San Bernard’ or the terrifying cartoon of ‘Saturn devouring his Children.’ Goya can be simple and bizarre, idyllic and grotesque, fascinating and appalling--his vitality emphasises every facet of his imagination. The examples of phases of his many-sided vision are inexhaustible. He makes demons terrible by their humanity, and men and women horrible by their diabolical sinisterism. He paints you a fête or a funeral, a picnic or a hanging, with the same facility and artistic assurance; be the mood he would portray gay or gloomy, the scene brilliant or shuddersome, the beauty that of a child, a blushing maiden or a dazzling Maja, he never hesitates, nor does he often come short of success.