Spanish PaintingBeruete y Moret, A. de (Aureliano)
History
Spanish Painting
Beruete y Moret, A. de (Aureliano)
Painting -- Spain -- History; Painting, Spanish
We do not mean to make any hard and fast assertion that Goya would not
have developed in intensity of feeling if he had not personally
experienced and suffered the horrors of the invasion, but merely to
indicate that it was this which brought about the revulsion within him
and powerfully exalted him. His last years in Madrid, and afterwards in
Bordeaux, where he died, were always characterized by the note of
pessimism, and at times, of horror, as is shown in the paintings which
once decorated his house and are now preserved in the Prado Museum. Not
a few portraits of these years also show that the artist gained in
intensity and in individual style. It is precisely these works, so
advanced for their time and so progressive, that provided inspiration to
painters like Manet, who achieved such progress in the nineteenth
century, and who were enamoured of the visions of Goya, of his technique
and his methods, naturalistic, perhaps, but always replete with
observation and individual expression.
We must not forget to mention that Goya produced a decorative
masterpiece of extraordinary distinction and supreme originality--the
mural painting of the Chapel of St. Antonio of Florida, in Madrid. Nor
is it less fitting to record his fecundity in the art of etching, in
which, as in his painting, it is easy to observe the development of
their author from a style gallant and spirited to an interpretation of
deep intensity, such as is to be witnessed in the collection of “The
Caprices” and “The Follies,” if these are compared with the so-called
“Proverbs” and especially with “The Disasters of War.”
The pictures representing Goya at Burlington House were composed of some
twenty works. Among those which belonged to his first period were the
portraits of the Marchioness of Lazan, the Duchess of Alba, lent by the
Duke of Alba, “La Tirana,” from the Academy of St. Fernando, the
Countess of Haro, belonging to the Duchess of San Carlos, four of the
smaller paintings of rural scenes, the property of the Duke of
Montellano, and _An Amorous Parley_ (“Coloquio Galante”), the property
of the Marquis de la Romana, the prototype of the Spanish feeling for
gallantry in the eighteenth century. As representative of the second
phase, of that which holds a note intense and pessimistic, may be taken
_A Pest House_, lent by the Marquis de la Romana, and those truly
dramatic scenes, the property of the Marquis of Villagonzalo.
Of portraits of the artist by himself two were exhibited, one small in
size painted in his youth (Plate XXVI.), in which the full figure is
shown, and the other a head, done in 1815, which gives us a good idea of
the expression and temperament of this extraordinary man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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