43 Facts About Francisco Goya

Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker.

Francisco Goya is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Francisco Goya was born to a middle-class family in 1746, in Fuendetodos in Aragon.

Francisco Goya studied painting from age 14 under Jose Luzan y Martinez and moved to Madrid to study with Anton Raphael Mengs.

Francisco Goya became a court painter to the Spanish Crown in 1786 and this early portion of his career is marked by portraits of the Spanish aristocracy and royalty, and Rococo-style tapestry cartoons designed for the royal palace.

Francisco Goya was guarded, and although letters and writings survive, little is known about his thoughts.

Francisco Goya had a severe and undiagnosed illness in 1793 which left him deaf, after which his work became progressively darker and pessimistic.

Francisco Goya was appointed Director of the Royal Academy in 1795, the year Manuel Godoy made an unfavorable treaty with France.

In 1799, Francisco Goya became Primer Pintor de Camara, the highest rank for a Spanish court painter.

Francisco Goya remained in Madrid during the war, which seems to have affected him deeply.

Francisco Goya eventually abandoned Spain in 1824 to retire to the French city of Bordeaux, accompanied by his much younger maid and companion, Leocadia Weiss, who may or may not have been his lover.

Francisco Goya's body was later re-interred in the Real Ermita de San Antonio de la Florida in Madrid.

Francisco Goya oversaw the gilding and most of the ornamentation during the rebuilding of the Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar, the principal cathedral of Zaragoza.

Francisco Goya's education seems to have been adequate but not enlightening; he had reading, writing and numeracy, and some knowledge of the classics.

At age 14 Francisco Goya studied under the painter Jose Luzan, where he copied stamps for 4 years until he decided to work on his own, as he wrote later on "paint from my invention".

Francisco Goya moved to Madrid to study with Anton Raphael Mengs, a popular painter with Spanish royalty.

Francisco Goya clashed with his master, and his examinations were unsatisfactory.

Francisco Goya submitted entries for the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in 1763 and 1766 but was denied entrance into the academia.

Francisco Goya was an unknown at the time and so the records are scant and uncertain.

Francisco Goya studied with the Aragonese artist Francisco Bayeu y Subias and his painting began to show signs of the delicate tonalities for which he became famous.

Francisco Bayeu, 1765 membership of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, and directorship of the tapestry works from 1777 helped Goya earn a commission for a series of tapestry cartoons for the Royal Tapestry Factory.

Francisco Goya had a complicated relationship to the latter artist; while many of his contemporaries saw folly in Francisco Goya's attempts to copy and emulate him, he had access to a wide range of the long-dead painter's works that had been contained in the royal collection.

Francisco Goya's c etching of The Garrotted Man was the largest work he had produced to date, and an obvious foreboding of his later "Disasters of War" series.

Francisco Goya was beset by illness, and his condition was used against him by his rivals, who looked jealously upon any artist seen to be rising in stature.

Ever resourceful, Francisco Goya turned this misfortune around, claiming that his illness had allowed him the insight to produce works that were more personal and informal.

Francisco Goya became friends with the King's half-brother Luis, and spent two summers working on portraits of both the Infante and his family.

In 1786, Francisco Goya was given a salaried position as painter to Charles III.

Francisco Goya was appointed court painter to Charles IV in 1789.

Francisco Goya painted portraits of the king and the queen, and the Spanish Prime Minister Manuel de Godoy and many other nobles.

Under his reign his wife Louisa was thought to have had the real power, and thus Francisco Goya placed her at the center of the group portrait.

The most popularly cited models are the Duchess of Alba, with whom Francisco Goya was sometimes thought to have had an affair, and Pepita Tudo, mistress of Manuel de Godoy.

Francisco Goya became withdrawn and introspective while the direction and tone of his work changed.

In 1799 Francisco Goya published 80 Caprichos prints depicting what he described as "the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual".

The condemnation of brutality towards prisoners is a subject that Francisco Goya assayed in later works that focused on the degradation of the human figure.

Ferdinand VII returned to Spain in 1814 but relations with Francisco Goya were not cordial.

Francisco Goya was tormented by a dread of old age and fear of madness.

Francisco Goya had been a successful and royally placed artist, but withdrew from public life during his final years.

Art historians assume Francisco Goya felt alienated from the social and political trends that followed the 1814 restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, and that he viewed these developments as reactionary means of social control.

Francisco Goya did not intend for the paintings to be exhibited, did not write of them, and likely never spoke of them.

Francisco Goya stayed with him in his Quinta del Sordo villa until 1824 with her daughter Rosario.

Francisco Goya was likely related to the Goicoechea family, a wealthy dynasty into which the artist's son, Javier, had married.

Francisco Goya had two children before that time, and bore a third, Rosario, in 1814 when she was 26.

Francisco Goya wrote to a number of Goya's friends to complain of her exclusion but many of her friends were Goya's and by then were old men or had died, and did not reply.