The importance of this factor is evident between his attitude towards life in his youth, when he accepted the world as it was quite happily, in his manhood when he began to criticize it, and in his old age when he became embittered and disillusioned with people and society. Furthermore, the world changed completely during his lifetime. The society, in which he had achieved a great success disappeared during the Napoleonic war. Long before the

At the age of seventeen he went to Madrid. Two painters who were working there, the last of the great Venetian painters-Tiepolo and the rather cold and efficient neo-classical painter- Antonio Raphael Mengs, influenced his style. In 1763 he entered a competition at the Royal Academy of San Fernando, and failed, as he did in the year 1766. In 1770, he went to Rome and survived by living off his works of art. He fled from Zaragoza to Madrid and to have gone as a toreador to Italy. Soon a legend grew up around the artist; he was regarded as a striking personality, independent and free from prejudice, and sometimes a fearless adventurer and amateur toreador. It could be that at one time, he really did stand in the arena, and that he was involved in several adventures as well as duels and countless love affairs.

Between the years 1810 and 1814 Goya produced his famous series of etchings- “The Disasters of War” and his two masterpieces- “The Second of May, 1808” and “The Third of May 1808”. These paintings show an extraordinarily powerful and expressive use of color. Goya concentrated exclusively on achieving a horrific effect, excluding everything that was irrelevant. They represented a revolutionary advance in the whole conception of the range and purpose of painting. For the first time war was depicted as futile and inglorious and for the first time there were no heroes, only the killer and those being killed. During the latter part of his life, before he moved to France, where he died, Goya covered the walls of his Deaf Man’s House with his famous “black painting” the last and most uncanny and extrovert of his strange and haunted genius. Some of his visions seemed to go deeper into the dark recesses of the mind than we are capable of penetrating. One, “Saturn Devouring one of his Children,” is one of the most horrifying pictures ever painted.

In 1792 he was ill and went completely deaf. This turned him upon himself. The gaiety slowly disappeared from his painting; the colors darkened and the brushwork became looser and more expressive. He carried on his work as a court painter, but looked elsewhere for inspiration-“to make observations for which commissioned works give no room, and in which fantasy and invention have no limit.” He painted for himself and hi

Some topics in this essay:
Modern Art”, Royal Commissions, Bayeu Madrid, Napoleonic Wars, Disasters War”, Italy Soon, Devouring Children”, La Condesa, Manet Impressionists, VII Spain, nineteenth century, san fernando, portraits women,