Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) was a great artist – the most important Spanish painter between Velázquez and Picasso – and a great survivor. Like Jacques-Louis David in France, he was a court painter who portrayed champions of the old order and champions of the Enlightenment; the repressive and the liberal. He painted his patron, the Spanish king Charles IV, a feckless booby devoted to hunting and fiddling with clocks; and Charles’s son Ferdinand VII, a despotic incompetent who had conspired with the French against his father, and whose political bungling led to the Peninsular War. Goya painted victors and vanquished, French generals and Wellington, their nemesis.
But Goya painted in a wholly different way than David, with often looser brushwork – more like late Titian or Velázquez. And his portraits show none of the pomp of David’s portraits of Napoleon. They are direct, natural, penetrating. The critic Thèophile Gautier felt Goya made the Spanish royal family look ridiculous – ‘as if the corner baker and his wife have won the lottery’. But the portraits are not satirical, just honest.
A comparison between Goya’s portraits of Charles IV and David’s of Napoleon crossing the Alps (1801) is telling. All the pictures of Charles show Goya striking a balance between authority and humanity. Charles didn’t want to be king. Napoleon wanted (desperately) to be emperor. In Goya’s 1799 portrait Charles IV in Hunting Dress the king’s adoring dog is looking up at him – the inscription on the collar reads ‘I BELONG TO OUR KING’. It is a domestic touch Goya uses often, particularly in his charming pictures of royal children. Napoleon would not have allowed such indignity. He refused to sit on a horse for David’s equine portrait or even to sit for a likeness – he insisted that he merely be shown looking heroic, ‘mounted on a fiery steed’. In contrast, when Goya painted Charles’s queen, Maria Luisa, on her horse it was a true likeness of her and the horse. Goya painted what he saw. She complained of the hours she sat on a plinth in full dress so ‘Goya can get on with his painting…’
The 80 bound engravings of Los Caprichos (1799) – The Caprices – is Goya’s pivotal work, his break from the past, stylistically and conceptually. A satire on vanity and pretension and power. The horrors of the Spanish War of Independence (1808-14) provoked Goya’s Disasters of War (1810-20), a series of 82 etchings – ‘The greatest anti-war manifesto in the history of art’ (Robert Hughes). They do not take sides. They simply show atrocities. Goya, totally deaf after a serious illness in 1820, descended into melancholy, which resulted in the 14 murals he painted (1820-23) in a villa outside Madrid, the Black Paintings, bleak pictures of terror. He despaired of political events in Spain, and the return under Ferdinand of state violence. Goya retired to Bordeaux in 1824.
He was not self-taught – at fourteen, he was apprenticed in Saragossa to José Luzán, a mediocre artist. But ‘there are no rules in painting’ said Goya. If technique can be learnt – from Rembrandt, from Velázquez – powers of observation cannot. Goya penetrated beyond status and veneer to the vulnerability within. ‘The world is a masquerade,’ he felt, ‘all wish to deceive…’
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes stands at the threshold between tradition and modernity, an artist who transformed portraiture into psychological revelation. His court paintings of figures such as Charles IV of Spain and Ferdinand VII reveal not just status and power, but hesitation, vanity, and human fragility beneath the regalia. In Goya’s hands, royal portraiture becomes something startlingly honest—unvarnished, intimate, and quietly unsettling.
Beyond the court, Goya’s imagination darkens and deepens. In Los Caprichos, he exposes the absurdities of superstition and social pretence; in The Disasters of War, he strips conflict of glory entirely, presenting suffering without heroism or consolation. These works feel astonishingly modern, anticipating the visual language of protest and documentary art centuries ahead of their time.
His final Black Paintings, created in isolation and silence, complete this journey inward. They are visions of fear, disillusionment, and psychological intensity—painted not for patrons, but for himself. Across his life, Goya evolved from court painter to uncompromising witness, capturing not just how the world looked, but how it felt to live within it.
Bring Goya’s piercing vision and dramatic world to your table with a beautifully designed pack of playing cards, today.
