Francisco Goya

Franciso (Jose Goya y Lucientes) Goya (1746-1828), perhaps the greatest Spanish painter, learned the art of etching from monks at Saragossa before going in 1776 to Madrid, where he was infuenced by Tiepolo. By 1786 Goya had become Court painter, executing a series of sparkling royal portraits. An illness in 1792 left him deaf; the Napoleonic invasion of 1808 caused a further transformation of his bitter experience, and his works became vivid images of the horrors of war. Retiring to a house in the country in 1814, he covered the walls with the so-called "Black" frescoes - imaginative images of degraded and bestial humanity. He moved to voluntary exile in Bordeaux in 1824, and died there in 1828.