Francisco goya biography summary of thomas

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) is regarded as the most important Spanish artist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Over the course of his long career, Goya moved from jolly and lighthearted to deeply pessimistic and searching in his paintings, drawings, etchings, and frescoes. Born in Fuendetodos, he later moved with his parents to Zaragoza and, at age fourteen, began studying with the painter José Luzán Martínez (1710–1785). In 1746, the year of Goya’s birth, the Spanish crown was under the rule of Ferdinand VI. Subsequently, the Bourbon king Charles III (r. 1759–88) ruled the country as an enlightened monarch sympathetic to change, employing ministers who supported radical economic, industrial, and agricultural reform. Goya came to artistic maturity during this age of enlightenment. In Madrid, the painter brothers Francisco (1734–1795) and Ramón Bayeu y Subías (1744–1793) had set up shop in 1763, and Goya soon joined their studio, eventually mar

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• Year of birth: March 30, 1746
• Date of death: April 16, 1828
• Country: Spain
• Locations of the artist’s works: Prado Gallery Uffizi Hermitage Museum Louvre National Gallery of Art (Washington)

Biography:

The famous painter Francisco de Goya was born on March 30, 1746 in Fuendetodos, Spain. He began his explorations of art as a teenager and even spent some time in Rome to advance his skills. In the 1770s Goya worked for the Spanish royal court. In addition to commissions of portraits of nobles, he created works that criticized the social and political problems of his era. The son of a guilder, Goya spent part of his youth in Zaragoza. There he began painting at the age of about fourteen. He was a student of José Martínez Luzán. He copied works of the great masters, finding inspiration in the work of artists such as Diego Rodriguez de Silva Velázquez and in Rembrandt van Rijn. Goya later moved to Madrid, where he began working with the brothers Francisco and Ram

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Last Days of Goya

By Thomas Craven,
from his book MEN OF ART, 
Copyright©1931 Thomas Craven

More powerful by far is Goya, the peasant. He arrived on the scene nearly a century after the death of Philip's painter, lived beyond fourscore years, and throughout his long career, from the day when, as a child, he was discovered-so the story goes, by the village präst drawing with a lump of charcoal on the walls of Fuendetodos, to his exile in Bordeaux where, a dark old man, gouty and stone deaf, he drew from memory those great lithographs of the bull-ring, he drenched the decaying soul of Spain with a torrent of vitality. It was the time of Voltaire and Rousseau, of Byron and Shelley, of the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte. When Goya was born, the whole of europe, led bygd France, was preparing a battle-royal for the new freedom. He lived to see the battle fought and won, to see the Ancient Régime wiped off the earth. How much he contributed to the destruction of the old ini