As regards painting, these influences commenced with the arrival at the Court of Lucas Jordán, who represented the influence of the great Italian decorative artists. Afterwards came Tiépolo, who left many marvellous works, quite inimitable by Spanish artists. The Bourbons introduced Van Loo, Ranc, Houasse and other French representatives of the art of the time; and lastly came Mengs, bringing with him a spirit wholly distinct from that of the French, a style erudite and academic which was not sufficiently powerful to create an artistic output of any importance in Spain, but which possessed much destructive power, although that was limited as regards time to about a century, during which period the national production was weak, despite the number of artists, of whom those most worthy to be mentioned are Maella, the Bayeus and Paret. Such was the condition of Spanish painting when, without precedent, reason or motive, appeared in the province of Aragon, a region which years afterwards came to typify the resistance to foreign invasion, a figure of great significance in Spanish art, and worthy of comparison with the greatest masters of the preceding centuries--Francisco de Goya. * * * * * The long life of Goya coincides with an epoch which divides two ages. The critic is somewhat at a loss how to place his work and personality, to conclude whether he is the last of the old masters or the first of the moderns. His greatness is so obvious, his performance so vast and its gradual evolution so manifest, that we may be justified in holding that the first portion of his effort belongs to the old order of things, while the second must be associated with the origins of modern painting. In his advance, in the manner and development of it, it is noticeable--as we have already said in certain of our works which deal with Goya--that he substituted for the picturesque, agreeable and suggestive note of his younger days, another more intense and more embracive. It would seem that the French invasion of the Peninsula, the horrors of which he experienced and depicted, influenced him profoundly in the alteration of his style. There is a Goya of the eighteenth century and a Goya of the nineteenth. But this is not entirely due to variation in technique, to mere artistic development, it is more justly to be traced to a change in creative outlook, in character, in view-point, which underwent a rude and violent transformation. Compare the subjects of his tapestries or of his festive canvases, joyful and gallant, facile in conception and at times almost trivial, with the tragic and macabre scenes of his old age, and with the drawings of this period and the compositions known as “The Disasters of War.”