Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was born in 1746 in a small village in Aragon and rose to become the court painter of three successive Spanish kings — but his importance far exceeds his official position. Goya is the hinge figure of Western art, the painter who closed the Old Master tradition and opened the door to modernity. His career spans an astonishing range: from sparkling Rococo tapestry cartoons and elegant aristocratic portraits to the most harrowing images of violence, madness, and human degradation ever painted.
The Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808 shattered Goya’s world. The Third of May 1808 (1814) depicts French soldiers executing Spanish civilians — the victims illuminated by a stark lantern, the firing squad a faceless machine of death. It is the first great protest painting, a work that would inspire Manet’s Execution of Maximilian, Picasso’s Guernica, and every subsequent artist who has tried to bear witness to atrocity. His print series The Disasters of War documented the conflict’s horrors with a brutal honesty that no artist had previously dared.
In his final years, deaf and increasingly isolated, Goya painted the “Black Paintings” directly on the walls of his house — nightmarish visions of witchcraft, madness, and cannibalism, including the terrifying Saturn Devouring His Son. These works, never intended for public view, are among the most psychologically disturbing images in all of art, anticipating Expressionism and Surrealism by a century.