Patrick Bade
Goya, Part 2

Patrick Bade | Goya, Part 2 | 06.19.21

• [Wendy] Morning, Patrick. Morning, Judes, again.

• Morning. Morning.

• [Wendy] Thrilled, thrilled to see you. Morning everybody, to all our participants. And, Patrick, so looking forward to Goya, part two. And I’m going to hand over to you.

• Thank you. Thank you, Wendy. And-

• Thank you so much. And, Judi, I’m going to be leaving five minutes early, so I’m going to leave it to you to wrap up today, please. Thank you. So in anticipation-

• [Judi] No problem.

• [Wendy] A million thanks, Patrick.

• Thank you. Thank you, Wendy and Judi. And I’m going to start by making an announcement that as from yesterday, I am an officially recognised resident of La République Francaise. And I couldn’t be more thrilled. They’ve given me residency for 10 years and that might see me out. I said to the woman yesterday, when she handed it to me, and I thanked her profusely. And I said, you know, I want to die in Paris. Not immediately, but eventually.

Anyway, so back to Goya and back to the rather dubious and sleazy Manuel Godoy, who was known as the Prince of Peace and also the lover of the Queen, and possibly also the King of Spain. But he was also a great art collector. And in 1803, he acquired the collection of the Duchess of Alba. And that collection included the one great nude in the history of Spanish painting, in the Golden era of the 17th Century Spain. The inquisition was all powerful. And the subject of the female nude was an absolute no go area.

So there’s been a lot of speculation about how Velasquez got away with painting this picture in the 17th Century, that it was presumably painted directly from somebody very high up in the Spanish royal family. And that was the only way you could get away with something like this. It’s also been speculated that the fact that the Venus, the famous, known as “The Rokeby Venus” in the National Gallery, it is shown from behind, may have been some kind of concession to Spanish bourgeois. She’s of course belongs to a tradition of the reclining female nude that goes back to Giorgione and Titian, this painting, which is probably begun by Giorgione, they think. And completed by Titian, “Sleeping Venus”, which is now in Dresden.

Most famous example was the “Venus of Urbino” of Titian. And ‘cause Titian was patronised by the Spanish royal family, and in particular King Philip II, who acquired many paintings, nudes, including this one. Of course, as King of Spain, he could get away with it, although these paintings were hung behind curtains and only brought out on special occasions. So Manuel Godoy, he owned the one great “Old Master” Spanish nude. And he owned, also owned this picture, which is the other great Spanish nude before the modern period.

This is the so-called nude, “Maja”. And a picture of great mystery. Again, there’s a lot of speculation. Did he commission it directly from Goya? We know that Goya worked for him. Well, of course, you’ve just seen the portrait. It’s rather, oh, might want to go back to it for a moment. Yes, this rather odd portrait of him, also in, weirdly, it’s very unusual for a man to be depicted in a reclining position. And he seems to be reclining on what looks like a rather comfortable modern sofa in the middle of a battlefield. Get back to the, the sofa actually is, could be the same sofa. It really is quite similar, even the same colour.

So did he commission it from, directly from Goya or, and this is also just speculation, did it come from the Duchess of Alba? Was it actually, did it belong to the Duchess of Alba? And that brings, me of course, to the other speculation, who modelled for this? Some people think it was the Duchess of Alba herself but there are other suggestions. It could be a portrait of a mistress of Godoy, or it could be a portrait of a mistress of Goya, or it could be a fusion of all three. And that’s very often the case.

So, again, it’s a painting that clearly belongs to this tradition of the reclining nude, but is also in some ways a rather, a break with that tradition. The nudes, the original for this tradition, the Dresden Venus or Giorgione/Titian, she’s of course asleep. She’s completely passive. Goya’s nude is not passive at all. She’s quite alert looking. And she’s given us a very, very direct glance. And here I compare, you know, the Venuses of Titian, they’re always looking away or their eyes are down, or their eyes are closed or whatever. They don’t directly engage with the viewer.

There is the other potentially quite scandalous detail of the discreet depiction of pubic hair, which is really completely unprecedented in Western art. It does not become normal to paint female pubic hair 'til right at the end of the century, Gauguin, Clint, artists like that do so. And, of course, there is the one notorious example in the middle of the century, which is the Courbet “Origin of the World”. So and it seems to be one of a pair of pictures. The other, this is the same woman in the same pose, but this time dressed. So this is the dressed Maja. And if you, actually, they’re not exactly a pair, even though the canvas is the same proportion and the same size. The dressed Maja is actually larger within the canvas.

And, in some ways, seems to come out of the canvas rather more than the nude Maja. She’s also very sexy. And, you know, well, of course, I’m sure none of you have ever looked at centre pages of a girly magazine. But if you had, you would know that actually the pinups like that are rarely totally nude. Total nudity is actually, in some ways, quite unerotic. And so partial clothing or very suggestive clothing like this, and the way the material hugs the body and suggests the anatomy underneath the surface is really quite erotic. So is this the same woman? Could be. I don’t, something I think that we’ll never know for sure. Her face is not terrifically individualised in the Maja portrait.

Now, what is a Maja. Maja is a, it’s a type of woman, strange in a country like Spain, which was so Catholic, so repressive, so conservative. A Maja was a young woman who really defied all of that kind of conservatism, who dressed in a very showy way, who behaved very boldly and lived a very unconventional life. And it was obviously a type of woman that fascinated Goya. And he painted and drew them on many occasions. This is one of his earlier tapestry designs.

This is his other very, very famous painting of Maja on the balcony, wonderfully atmospheric, slightly sinister painting, the sinister male figures behind these gorgeous but very confident females. And another picture, which seems to show this type of woman, is this one of a Maja on a balcony where there is, I think, a suggestion of prostitution. And the old woman in the background who was probably there to negotiate the price of the younger woman. So we got up to the period of the Napoleon invasion last week. And so this led to a period of great instability in Spain and several very rapid changes of regime.

So 1808, you’ve still got King Charles III and Maria Luisa, but Spain is effectively run by Manuel Godoy. Then there’s a crisis. And Charles III is forced to abdicate in favour of his son, Ferdinand, who was extremely conservative, really wanted to push Spain back into the dark ages. And then Napoleon sees an opportunity with all this chaos and instability and he forces the resignation of Ferdinand. And, instead, he places his brother, Joseph Bonaparte on the throne of Spain. He also invades Portugal. So this was just a piece of opportunism on Napoleon’s part. 1808, Napoleon is absolutely, the French Empire is at the peak of its success. And the opportunity to grab Spain and Portugal was just too much to resist.

But you could, with hindsight, you can say it was his first serious misstep to do this, that to hold down Spain and Portugal, to occupy neighbouring countries with an increasingly hostile population, this was never, never going to end well. And then of course, his other great misstep shortly afterwards, 1812 was to invade Russia. So I think we can be fairly clear about where Goya’s political sympathies lay. He was a man of the enlightenment. He was a liberal. He would’ve liked reform and, but he had to negotiate all these changes of regime.

You know, he was the principal court artist to successive rapid changes of regime. And it was an extremely tricky position to be in. So this painting on the left-hand side, which is in Apsley House in London, shows the Duke of Wellington on horseback. But it has a very interesting history. It started off as a portrait of Manuel Godoy. And then of course 1808, he’s out, he falls and Joseph Bonaparte is imposed. So it then becomes, he painted out Godoy and onto that horse went Joseph Bonaparte. Joseph Bonaparte doesn’t last very long because the Brits, under the Duke of Wellington, invade Spain and they topple him. And they defeat the French.

So the last person to land up on the horse in this very odd picture, it’s not really I think a very convincing or successful picture, is the Duke of Wellington. And the etching you see on the right-hand side, I think is in a very bitter, ironic comment on Goya’s situation in all of this. He’s shown the artist as a monkey, painting a donkey. And that’s what he must have felt like sometimes. As I said, he was a man basically of the left. He was a liberal, a man of the enlightenment. So there must have been a side of him that actually was quite sympathetic to the French, at least to begin with, because it was hoped that, you know, think of all the things that Napoleon had done, how he had broken the power of the Catholic church. He had really opened up, he’d opened up all the ghettos in the parts of Europe that he, in many ways, Napoleon was a liberal.

But, and represented enlightened, the enlightened values of the revolution. It was just that his megalomania got the better of him. But as the French occupation really turned sour, and it turned out to be something very brutal, obviously, I think Goya must have very rapidly lost sympathy with the French. And so we have this peninsula war, I think it was a couple of lectures ago, somebody said could I explain the peninsula war, peninsula being Spain and Portugal. And so the British landed in Portugal and there was , in Spain, there were multiple insurrections and rebellions against the French. And the British Army, in combination with Spanish partisans, you could see it as being rather similar actually to the liberation of France at the end of the Second World War.

It was a bitter, terrible war of attrition as the British and the partisans pushed the French, step by step, backwards, eventually across Pyrenees. And it was a war fought with unbelievable ferocity and cruelty. And Goya made his comment on it in one of his greatest series of etchings, “The Disasters of War”, incredibly powerful, timeless images. I mean, this could be any 20th Century war. This could be the murder of partisans or Jews by the Germans in the Second World War. All the terrible horrors of modern warfare are represented and predicted. You know, brutal rapes, appalling atrocities.

This painting I think is one of Goya’s greatest, I think it’s one of the greatest paintings ever created by a Western artist. And it’s called “The Third of May”. It’s one of two big paintings that represent events of 1808. In fact, Goya didn’t get round to, he wasn’t there at the time. So although this image has extraordinary veracity, extraordinary power, it wasn’t something that he’d witnessed personally. It was something he knew about. And he painted it five to six years after the event.

So what happened was, see, I’ll come back to that image in a minute. Oh, so this painting and its pair, “The Second of May”, which I’ll show you in a minute, are examples of a new, relatively new genre in Western art, which is the modern history painting. And the artist who’s usually credited with creating this new genre was an American, Benjamin West. This is usually cited as the first example of a modern history painting. I’m sure all the Canadians listening in will be extremely familiar with this painting, shows the death of General Wolfe in the Seven Years’ War, in the taking of Quebec, which was obviously a very determining event in the history of Canada. And so, of course, no news, direct news coverage, visual news coverage at the time. So Benjamin West came up with this idea of painting a picture on quite a large scale of this event, this current event.

But painting it on a kind of ennobled heroic scale. So like you might paint some event from antique history. So Benjamin West is an interesting figure, ‘cause I don’t think anybody would claim that this is a very great painting or that he’s a very great painter, but he is significant. He’s, in art, historically important for three reasons. Firstly, he’s the first American-born painter to gain a worldwide, international recognition. Secondly, he is one of the very first pioneers of the new neo-classical style in the 1760s. You know, the rather sculptural treatment of the figures. Look at this Native American who looks actually just like an ancient Greek athlete with feathers attached.

And that actually does remind me of a rather delightful anecdote of Benjamin West, who went to Rome in the 1760s to imbibe neoclassicism directly from Winckelmann. He was introduced to a cardinal. And the cardinal was very disappointed when, 'cause he’d heard that Benjamin West came from America. And he expected him to be decorated with feathers, 'cause he thought all Americans wore feathers. But anyway, so this is, as you can see, this is an event. But it’s, as I said, it’s painted on heroic noble scale. And before I show you my next image, which will give it away, I want you to just think for a minute, where does this composition come from? What image that would’ve been familiar to nearly everybody in Europe would’ve come to mind, at least unconsciously, when they looked at this picture? And, of course, it’s the deposition of Jesus from the cross.

This is Veronese on the left-hand side. So that’s a kind of iconic standard image in Western art. But here we have a completely secular subject, nothing to do with Jesus, nothing to do with Christianity, but exploiting those kind of visual associations. And we’ll see Goya doing the same in a minute. So this is “The Second of May”. Yeah, so I need to tell you something about this event. There was, this was the French were occupying Madrid, rather brutally. And there was a popular insurrection on the 2nd of May 1808, when the populace of Madrid attacked French cavalry soldiers. This is what we see here.

And if it weren’t for the fact that “The Third of May” is just such an amazingly powerful image, we’d probably think this was a wonderful picture too. But it’s completely overshadowed. It’s, in some ways, a much more conventional image. And I think it’s one that goes back to Leonardo’s famous “Battle of Anghiari”, with this whirling swell of fighting figures and horses that Goya could never have seen 'cause it had been painted over long before Goya’s birth. But he would’ve been familiar with the image because other artists, including Rubens here, had copied it and there were prints after it. So I think that’s where this composition comes from.

So the following day, the French decided to, they went round the streets, they just rounded up people at random and they executed them. You know, of course, it’s one of, we all know that this is one of the, this kind of overreaction and collective punishment is always a mistake. It always makes matters worse. But people don’t learn from history. The French didn’t learn from it, they continued to do these things. The British did them in their empire. Of course, the Germans did it again and again during the Second World War in occupied countries. When there were, there’s any sign of revolt, they would try and stamp down on it and they would always make things much worse.

So here again is this absolutely terrifying image of these poor people just randomly rounded up in the streets of Madrid and mowed down by French troops. It’s a depiction of a very specific image, of a specific event, but it’s so much more than that. I think it’s one of the greatest denunciations of human cruelty, of man’s brutality against other human beings. And again, I wonder if it occurred to you before I mention, what the visual image is that comes to mind. 'Cause the man is throwing his arms out in a gesture that actually suggests crucifixion. So in a way, by pointing it out, I’m spoiling it for you 'cause it’s rather better if it works subliminally, if it works unconsciously.

Now, as I said, it’s the, this type of modern history painting invented by Benjamin West is picked up by various great artists in the early 19th Century. So I think you can say the first 30 years of the 19th Century is the high point of the modern history painting. And there are many, many famous examples. Though in my opinion, the Goya has a kind of directness and immediacy, a power that is beyond any of the others.

So this is painted, this is 1814. This is Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa” that I’ve talked about before, Christmas, which it’s trying to do the same kind of thing. It’s depicting a contemporary event, but it’s also trying to reach towards some kind of great universal truth about the fragility and the helplessness of man in the face of fate, in the face of nature and so on. And it’s a wonderful, it’s a very powerful picture. I’m always kind of awed by it when I go to the Louvre and look at it. But compared to the Goya, somehow it’s very artificial. You know, you feel that you’re looking like at a great pile of sculptures. It doesn’t have quite that truthfulness and immediacy that the Goya has. And, of course, Delacroix is the other artist who paints modern history pictures.

This is the 1830 Revolution. And this was something I think that he probably witnessed firsthand in the streets of Paris, the barricades that went up in the street, and the street fighting and so on. But again, he’s trying to raise it to a higher, more universal, more timeless level. And you have this kind of Venus vigour inspired by the Venus of Milos, carrying forward the French tricolour flag. I’d say the two for me, it’s interesting that the two greatest and most powerful images of man’s inhumanity to man are both by Spanish artists. I dunno if that is particular reflection of the tragedies of Spanish history.

But, certainly, the most powerful image of man’s inhumanity to man in 20th Century art is Picasso’s “Guernica” which you see here. And there was a lot of fuss in the news recently about Chinese attempts to suppress this image, apparently, for a while when there was the anniversary of the Tienanmen Square, this very famous image of an incredibly brave young man, standing there, facing the brutality of the tanks. It suddenly disappeared and searchers on the internet couldn’t find it. And I thought, it’s interesting I suppose, it’s a coincidence to some extent, but not entirely I think, that this figure, the victim figure is shown in a white shirt.

I wonder if this ever occurred to this young man, I mean, whether he actually planned to do this. We know so little about it, whether it was a spontaneous gesture on his part. And if he planned it, did he deliberately choose to wear a white shirt? 'Cause it was certainly a lot of the power of that image is in the white shirt. So here is the repulsive and horrible Ferdinand. And when Napoleon is finally defeated, the end of Napoleonic Wars, he is restored to the throne of Spain. And as you can see from this picture, he continued to patronise Goya.

But Goya was in a very, very dodgy position because of his association with liberals. Liberals were under attack, they were hunted down, they were murdered, they were imprisoned. And so Goya painted this portrait of him. And Goya had that thing, I think I mentioned it last week, that Velasquez had, about this extraordinary ability or compulsion maybe, to tell the truth even in the face of power. And with the Velasquez “Innocent X” on the right-hand side, the Goya, Ferdinand on the left-hand side. We look into these faces and we see evil, we see abuse of power. I don’t think I’m being too fanciful in saying it. I’m not the only person who said it. And anyway, to compare it to, you know, flashy Thomas Lawrence, always prepared to flatter, the grossly obese and no longer handsome Prince Regent being outrageously flattered by Lawrence.

Somebody said to me in the questions last time, you know, why should Goya have flattered anybody? Well, frankly, I think painting Ferdinand like this was quite an act of courage. You know, I think he was pretty well putting his head on the block. And he was, there were points where he had to go into hiding 'cause he was really, seriously under threat. So it’s around this time with the peninsula war and all these dreadful things going on that we see a darkening in his view of the world, understandably. I mean, it’s something that’s, it’s been an ongoing process since the early 1790s when he had his first illness and the onset of his deafness. And, obviously, an increasing sense of isolation and disillusion.

This supposedly shows a popular festival, “The Burial of the Sardine”. And its subject matter looks back to all those very delightful tapestry cartoons of people having a good time and popular local costumes. When we get a bit closer, ooh, it’s a bit scary, some of this stuff. This is, there’s a bit, it’s a sort of nightmarish quality that’s coming into his work. So, of course, if you want to see the late, great works of Goya you have to go to Spain with the alternately, the other place where you can go and see two of his greatest later masterpieces is the Musée des Beaux-Arts Buzar In Leal. These two paintings are in Leal.

For Brits, that’s dead easy. Once we get sorted out with all these restrictions, you can take Eurostar from St. Pancras, and in an hour and 15 minutes you can be in the centre of Leal and you can walk to the museum. It’s fantastic collection, anyway. It’s one of the greatest collections of painting outside any capital city in Europe. And maybe, two of its greatest treasures are these large-scale paintings done around 1813, '14 called “Les Jeunes et les Vieilles”, “The Young Women and the Old Women”.

And enormous amount of speculation. Well, I think it’s pretty obvious with the old women that it’s really about the passing of time, the effects of time and the inevitability of death. But with the beautiful young women as well, there is a sort of this, well, there’s been a speculation about what this painting means, what he really wants to say with it. But there’s clearly a contrast between these rather privileged, beautiful, selfish young women and the working women in the background.

Let me get a bit closer so you can see this extraordinary technique that he uses. Somebody was asking last week, what does painterly mean? So, I mean, these late paintings of Goya are perfect definition of painterly where the, Titian, of course, is the ultimate granddaddy of all painterly painters. And by the end of Titian’s life, he’d put paint on the surface every possible way you can do it, you know, with fingers, with rags, with course brushes, thickly, thinly, scumbling, all these kind of things. And those late Titians were there in Madrid and they certainly provided a lot of inspiration.

Here’s a little doggy with the young ladies and these amazing washer women in the background. Now, if I hadn’t shown you the whole picture, and I just showed you this and I said who painted this and when, what would you say? I mean, you might say it was Manet, you might say, I don’t know, you might say it was an expressionist painting of the 20th Century. This is, here is a comparison with Daumier, he’s an artist I’ll be talking about in 10 days or two weeks.

And, actually, I was trying to find out on the internet, I need to do a bit of research on this, when these paintings by Goya actually came to France. And if Daumier could have seen them. There’s certainly a very, very strong affinity. And when you look at this, this is really amazing 'cause washer women of course were a favourite subject of Daumier. And I probably, you know, if I was very unscrupulous, could have got away with including the image on the left-hand side in my Daumier lecture and persuaded you it was actually by Daumier.

And here is the detail of the hands of the old ladies in “La Vieille”, with all this crumbly, scumbled, broken brushwork. And this is a comparison I think rather than an influence. This is Rembrandt, “Margaretha de Geer”. I think this is one of the most amazing bits of paint in the National Gallery in London. It’s really worth going and, you know, if you can, get down on your knees and look at it close to like this. And, again, you can see all the scumbling, that’s this broken, dragged brushwork, the lighter turns. And this sort of crumbly, crumbly surface. So when you get very close to it, you’re very aware of it being paint. And if you half close your eyes or you go away a little bit, it gives you the most incredible illusion of an elderly, bony hand with the parchment-like skin stretched over it.

So and you can see similar, I think Goya, he certainly was very familiar with Rembrandt through his etchings. But I don’t think Goya would’ve had the opportunity to see Rembrandt oil paintings until he visits Paris in 1824. So he, as I said, he has to really disappear. He buys himself a house outside of Madrid. In 1812, his wife, Josefa Bayeu, who you see on the left-hand side, she dies. She had given him many children, only one of whom survived.

And I mean, I can’t, oh, somebody was asked me last week about biography. And my friend, Fiona, actually has just happened to finish reading the Robert Hughes biography, great big, thick biography, which I haven’t read for many years. But I remember enjoying, and she loved it and it’s certainly readable and full of interesting detail. So that is probably answer to that question that I was answered last week. And it will go into the personal side of his life.

So he was, I don’t how happy their marriage was. He certainly had mistresses, but then that was kind of normal in those days. And the woman on the right is rather an enigmatic figure. She’s called Leocadia Weiss. And she became his housekeeper. And it’s generally assumed she was his mistress and that they had an illegitimate child together. And this painting here, this house that he lived in outside of Madrid, he decorated the walls of the house with these paintings, which are now collectively known as Goya’s “Black Paintings” and to be seen in Madrid.

And these paintings were an entirely private statement. So he was trying to keep out of the limelight. He was hidden. So he wasn’t expecting people to come and see them in his house. I don’t think he expected them to last because they were painted in oils directly on the walls. So, which meant that, you know, he can’t have imagined that they could ever have been removed. And painting in oil on a wall is not a clever thing to do if you want your work of art to last. It will, it’s most likely going to disintegrate very soon. Yet these are some of his most powerful and amazing images. This is “The Procession to San Isidro”.

I mean, these are paintings which are so timeless, they’re so modern. This is expressionism, you know, this extreme distortion, exaggeration for an emotional effect. The darkness of vision seemed very, very 20th Century. They’ve all been given titles but they don’t, the titles are an invention. They don’t come from Goya himself. And the collective meaning of them and the individual meaning of them is all speculative. So your opinion is sort of as good as mine or anybody else’s. It’s been suggested that this image of men secretly, furtively reading may have something to do with the suppression of free thought in this new, very conservative, Catholic Spain.

There’s an interesting theory that, 'cause we know they were around the house, there were different rooms. We’re not absolutely sure which paintings were in which rooms. But this painting of two old men eating soup may have been in the dining room. And these two painting, oh, this painting also on the left may have been in the dining room. This is Saturn devouring his children, absolutely terrifying image, clearly based on a memory of the Rubens, which was in the Spanish Royal Collection. It’s still in the Prado of the same subject.

But, I mean, wonderful though Rubens is, I think he’s completely outdone by Goya. Goya’s image is so much more powerful, so much more terrifying than the Rubens. Oh, yes, this is the other painting that may have been in the dining room. You think, oh, my God, well, this would’ve been enough to put you off your dinner. This is Judith about to chop off the head of Holofernes, after they’ve just had a wonderful banquet and presumably had sex together as well. And so this is such a powerful, amazing image of these two men cudgelling each other, beating. So what a metaphor this could be. This could be a metaphor for the Middle East situation, these two men attacking each other. They’re sinking, they’re going to die because they’re sinking into a quick sand, but they’re more busy attacking one another.

So these paintings, it’s actually extraordinary that they survive. And they survive thanks to a German French Jewish banker, philanthropist, of course, Baron Emile d'Erlanger. And he bought the paintings, he had them removed, must have been a very tricky business, removed from the wall. Initially, he seems to have thought about selling them and they, so the first time that the world saw them was at the Paris World Exhibition of 1878 in the Spanish section. And they were exhibited. And I know this is a very dim image, if you can just make out that on the left-hand side, the procession, the “Pilgrimage to San Isidro”.

But it was too soon. It was, people were were shocked by them, couldn’t make head or tail of them, thought they were very crude. So nobody really could appreciate them in 1878. It’s interesting, I still think, well, if he’d waited till the 1889 exhibition, there would’ve at least been young artists around who I think would’ve, you know, would’ve appreciated them. And it wasn’t really until the, into the 20th Century that they really came into their own.

This is Baron d'Erlanger, you see on the right-hand side. And not having sold them in 1878, he then donated them to the Prado. Oh, there’s another, oh, such a poignant image of this drowning dog. He continues to paint portraits but these portraits are, these later portraits, they’re very different from his earlier aristocratic or commission portraits that, obviously, all the people he knew very well, people that he trusted. I love these late portraits. I think I like them best of all. They’re painted with very extraordinary economy of means. It’s just black, white, earth colours and a bit of pink. And that’s it.

You know, there’s hardly any other colour in them. And I mentioned, Dugour’s comment about the Spanish delicate muddiness. I mean, they’ve got a sort of smudged, muddy look to them. But an extraordinary humanity, an extraordinary life, the quality that you find in the greatest portraits of Velazquez and Rembrandt as well. Two very moving pictures. The one on the left is a priest. He was, Juan Duazo Elatra his name was. And he, who actually sheltered, there was a point where Goya was really threatened with arrest and being thrown into prison or being executed or being murdered. And he, but he was sheltered by a Catholic priest with liberal political sympathy.

So you see on the left-hand side. So this picture was obviously done as a kind of thank you, as was the one done on the right-hand side. In 1819, he had another very serious illness and very nearly died. And his doctor, Dr. Arrieta, saved his life. And Goya painted this very moving portrait of himself, apparently close to death, in the arms of his doctor, his very caring doctor in that wonderful, amazing and these rather strange spectral figures in the background. So 1823, he was warned that actually he, you know, things were getting worse and worse, more Catholic, more conservative in Spain and that he’d better get out.

So he actually, 1823, he moves across the border to Bordeaux. And he spent the rest of his life in Bordeaux. And the following year he went to Paris for the first and only time. And we know that he attended the salon, the great art exhibition that took place every May and June. And, God, this is again wonderful, rich speculation one can have about this. Salon of 1824 was one of the key salons of the 19th Century. It was one, that was the salon where the battle lines between Delacroix and Ingres were drawn up. Oh, this shows the opening of the 1824 salon by, in the presence of King Charles X. And so these were the two paintings that were at war with one another, you could say. It was Ingres who represented, he thought, the classical tradition and conservatism in the Catholic face and so on. And you’ve got the radical, new, romantic Delacroix.

Again, between the two, you can’t very tell from these images on the screen. But if you can get close to them, this would be a perfect example of the difference between a linear artist, Ingres on the left, and a painterly artist. If you get close to that painting, all the broken brushwork and the interesting way that the paint is put on the surface. This is the “Massacre of Chios”, which is another of course great modern history painting, denouncing the cruelty of the Turks in trying to suppress, another case, of course, of an occupying power with an angry, reluctant people rebelling against them.

But wonderful as the Delacroix is, I have to, once again, it looks so staged, so choreographed. It doesn’t have that forcefulness, that spontaneity that the Goya has. Of course, the other thing, wouldn’t we love to know, we Brits would love to know what Goya thought of this 'cause he saw that in the 1824 salon. We know what Delacroix thought about it 'cause he wrote about it in his diary. Sadly, Goya didn’t keep a diary. And this, another mystery, there’s so many mysteries with Goya.

Well, 'cause there are people who maintain, I’ve been having a very interesting correspondence by the way, backwards and forwards, about the Raeburn versus Danloux theories about “The Skating Minister”. Somebody did come forward with a theory that Goya didn’t paint “The Black Paintings”, that they’re actually painted by his son. I mean, that I find really hard to swallow, that there was another artist of that level of genius that we don’t know about.

And this painting I think is a wonderful painting. And the speculation about who the girl is. Is it Leocadia Weiss, his mistress? Is it actually her daughter? And is it by Goya himself? Well, I think it’s a wonderful painting. I don’t really care whether it’s by him or not. I still think it’s a wonderful painting. And I’m going to just very rapidly look at Goya’s legacy and how artists have reacted to him. So, like so many artists, he was a forgotten figure after he died. And very little known outside of Spain.

I suppose it was largely, insofar as he was known, it would’ve been through his etchings. Things change in the middle of the century in France under the Second Empire. Louis-Napoleon of course marries the Spanish aristocrat, Eugénie. She becomes Emperor, Empress. And there’s a kind of craze for everything Spanish, Spanialism, this love of everything Spanish in France. And the most famous example of that, of course, is Edouard Manet, this is his painting of a Spanish dancer, Lola de Valence. Manet goes, actually goes to Madrid in the early 1860s to study all the Spanish paintings firsthand. He’s blown away by Velazquez.

The “Maja” wasn’t in the Prado at the time, but I imagine he must have got to see it. And his “Olympia”, again, this tradition of the reclining nude is very, very much closer to Goya than it is to Titian or any of the other earlier reclining nudes. And all the way through the 1860s, which I think is the most interesting decade in Manet’s career, all his major pictures are really updatings of earlier, old master pictures that he admires, they’re kind of homage.

And “Le Balcon”, this marvellous picture dating from 1868, that shows Berthe Morisot and two friends standing on a balcony. But it’s a kind of, there’s something almost comic about the contrast really, isn’t there? All that sort of dark romanticism and mystery of the Goya. And this very bourgeois, matter of fact Manet is certainly, it may be an updating of the Goya but it’s certainly a different view of the world. And the, Manet’s painting of “The Execution of Maximilian” of Mexico, which he worked on in several versions at the end of the 1860s.

It was clearly a political statement. It was a, actually, an anti-government statement. It was a statement against the policies of Louis-Napoleon who had set up Maximilian as a kind of puppet in Mexico and then abandoned him when the going got rough. So by painting this subject, of course, Manet was making a political statement. And it’s so ironic really, that his source was a painting denouncing French brutality by Goya. This is the largest version, which has been chopped up. And the difference, if you look at the soldier’s backs, so if you take away the victims, from the Goya, we know from what we can see here that something horrific and terrible is happening.

But the Manet, they could be firing at tin cans. Goya plays a big role in the revival of etching as a medium in the second half of the 19th Century. And the first major figure is Whistler. Whistler certainly learned a lot from Goya, technically. I think he looked at him and learned from him. But of course Whistler is, again, a very different personality. So there’s, Whistler is about art for art’s sake. It’s not polemical. There’s no polemical element. There’s no satirical, polemical, no fantastic element. It’s very matter of fact in Whistler. Where you do get, certainly, both the polemical, political, fantastic elements of Goya are picked up by Max Klinger in the last couple of decades of the 19th Century.

These, there’s a very Goya-esque image on the right-hand side. It’s called “The First Step”, which shows a desperate young girl being lured into prostitution. This very sinister, top-hatted figure you can see on the left of that image. And the fantasy in, this is Max Klinger’s series, “The Glove”, dreamlike quality. And from Max Klinger, of course, an artist who was initially very influenced by Max Klinger, but through him I think must have looked at Goya, is another very great graphic artist. This is Käthe Kollwitz. And this is an image from her series about the peasant war. And it shows a raped woman. I think this is probably the first image of rape in Western art from, literally, from a woman’s perspective rather than from a male perspective. And a great graphic artist who picks up on the fantasy, the dreamlike element in Goya’s prints is Odilon Redon.

Of course, his technique is a very different one. These are not etchings, these are lithographs. Another series, important series of Goya prints which I haven’t talked about, is the “Tauromaquia”, celebrating bull fighting. And these had a great impact on both Dali and, this is Picasso. In fact, Picasso also produced a series of prints towards the end of his life called “Tauromaquia”, clearly as a kind of homage to Goya. And this is Salvador Dali. So these paintings, suddenly, you know, as I said in 1878, people said, “What? What’s that?” But by about 1910, when expressionism is really at its height, these looked completely modern. And so, you know, I think you can say all the way through the 20th Century that expressionist tradition that the Goya is the Godfather, he’s the patron saint of expressionism.

This is George Grosz on the left-hand side. And one of the greatest graphic series in the 20th Century, Otto Dix, “Der Krieg”, “The War”, is showing horrible Bastille atrocities during the First World War. Clearly, directly inspired by these of Otto Dix, again, by “The Disasters of War”. And I’m just, I’m going to choose some very personal examples here. This is an artist I admire very, very much called Francis West, who died five years ago, very sadly. The gentlest, sweetest person you could know. But obviously it was a very, very dark side to his psyche and he offers a very dark view of the world, as Goya does. This is a painting, it’s in my dining room in London.

Again, a lot of people have complained that it’s put them off their dinner. And this painting is actually directly in front of me as I speak to you. I could turn around the screen and you’d see it, also by Francis West. And so I think for him, I mean, he was an artist who was interested in many artists, but Goya was certainly in a very special place for him. This is a South African artist I thought I’d mentioned to you, called Ansel Krut. And he had a phase, when was that? Probably in the 1990s. A very Goya phase. And he, I’ve often regretted I didn’t buy one of these pictures 'cause they’re wonderful. He’s got that, again, that delicate muddiness that’s so characteristic of Goya. And the sense of mystery and ambiguity.

This is also Ansel Krut. This is by my friend, Mathew Baynton, who belongs very firmly in the expressionist tradition. And has learnt a lot from Goya, both technically and in the darkness of his vision. And we finish, somebody asked me last week about the Chapman brothers, who’ve obviously been quite fixated with Goya’s from quite early on in their career. And they’re also totally fixated with man’s inhumanity to man and incredible cruelty. And they did a whole series really kind of riffing in a way on the second World War and the Holocaust. I have mixed feelings about all of this, whether there’s actually a rather exploitational element in it.

Then with Goya image from “The Disasters of War” and a sculpture by the Chapman brothers. And then this. So I don’t know, I don’t know what to say about this really. Some, you asked me directly. I still, I get the point and I can see that of course the whole point is that they should shock. But I feel uncomfortably shocked that they would take real, why was it necessary actually to take real etchings of Goya? There’s something gross about it, the fact that they could earn such enormous sums of money, they could do it. But anyway, I leave that to you. Maybe you think it was a gesture worthwhile. And so this is where I come to an end. Let’s see if we have some questions.

Q&A and Comments

Do, oh, it’s a note here, is it? Yeah. Thank you for your congratulations. Thank you. Very nice to have all these nice, in French, congratulations. And let me see.

Q: Why is Paris your heart’s desire? A: I do, and I love other places. I absolutely, you know, Munich is a place I’ve had the happiest times of my life in, in Munich. I’m not sure I would want to live there now. Barcelona, I really did consider, 'cause I adore Barcelona. But Paris, what can I say? Every time I step outside my flat, I’m walking on air, it’s so wonderful.

The second battle also like Uccello. Well, yes, I mean, there is that tradition of battle scenes, although I think it’s much closer in its kind of dynamic, swirling composition to the Leonardo than it is to the Uccello.

The Goya, “Third of May” painting is in the Prado in Madrid.

Could the Venus figure, yes, I suppose she does represent Marianne who’s the sort of, you know, the archetypal French woman. Prince Regent’s and King’s paintings. Lucian Freud’s portrait of Parker Bowles. I don’t think I’ve seen it. I’ll look it up.

I do hope, well, one of these days, I hope to be able to take some of you around the National Gallery. That would be, 'cause I mean I’ve worked, you know, over half a century in the National Gallery. You know, it’s really in my bones.

Q: Would he have seen Bruegel? A: He would’ve seen Bosch, 'cause there are very important Bosches. I’m just trying to think what Bruegels there are in the Spanish Royal Collection. Presumably, I think there must have been, 'cause it was a, you know, Flanders was a Spanish possession. But the Bosch, absolutely, he knew.

Yes, I mean, he was painting right up to the end, if indeed he did paint that, “The Milkmaid of”… So Constable, what he said about Constable, he said he admired the variety of the greens. And he talks about it several times. I mean, just little comments, nothing very, very detailed. And there is, people sometimes said that he repainted parts of his own picture, having looked at the Constable and seeing the way the Constable applied broken brushwork. Let me see. The Neville.

Q: Do I think that the Peter Howson, the powerful Scottish artist and in his series of war paintings? A: Yeah, absolutely. No doubt. Yes, I mean, it’s very hard for an artist, you know, and I agree with you, those Peter Howson things that he did in Bosnia are very, very powerful. But I think, you know, after Goya, nobody can really do that kind of thing without referring to Goya.

Right. Mentioned the collection in Leal.

Q: Are there other works? A: Yes, Leal is fantastic. Leal has three amazing museums. If you’re very, very well organised, you can see three in a day. But I would say stay overnight. Musée de la Piscine, it’s actually Roubaix but it’s part of the Leal, new, town area. It’s on my list of half a dozen favourite museums in the world. Musée de la Piscine, museum of the swimming pool, in Roubaix is such a fantastic museum. And there’s also a very, very good museum of modern art with wonderful Modiglianis. And wonderful Braque, wonderful Picasso. There’s three great museums in Leal and you can eat fabulously, although it’s probably not very easy to eat kosher in Leal. You know, over the restaurants they have the sign saying “spécialité des viandes de l'abattoir” and you know what you’re getting there.

You assume that Goya wished to have popular sales with his etchings. I’m not sure about that. I mean, etchings, you have a limited run with an etching. And, well, of course, he had to earn money. But I don’t think he was somebody who particularly, you know, was running after popularity.

Yes, the facial anonymity, I should have said that. That is an important point about those soldiers, that makes them so sinister and so powerful. And that’s it.

Thank you very, very much. And I’m glad you all celebrated my good news. And I’ll see you again on Wednesday.

• [Judi] Thank you so much, Patrick. And thank you to everybody who joined us today. And we will see everybody tomorrow. Take care, everybody.

• [Patrick] Bye-bye.

• [Judi] Bye-Bye. Bye.