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Francisco de Goya: Painting Darkness

Valent Museum is honored to host this exhibition of personal creations from Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes' legendary career in the arts. Painting Darkness gathers together several thematic threads of his work: his sharing of outrage at the horrors of warfare, his interest in folk belief and superstition, his fascination with the grotesque and his mordant sense of humor.

Francisco de Goya: Painting Darkness runs at Valent Museum from August 12th until November 10th. Guided tours are half-hourly between 9am and 6pm, taking forty-five minutes. Late night tours will be scheduled on holidays, and in the week preceding and following Halloween.


Self-Portrait. 1815. Oil on panel, 51 x 46 cm. Royal Academy of San Fernando, Madrid, Spain.



Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes, was born on March Thirtieth, 1746 in Fuendetodos, a village in northern Spain, to Jose Goya and Engracia Lucientes. He was apprenticed to the studio of painter José Luzán y Martinez in Zaragoza at the age of twelve, and continued to study and experiment throughout his career. By the age of twenty-three, his commissioned works had funded a journey to study in Madrid.

In 1773 he married Josefa Bayeu, sister of Francisco Bayeu, a friend and fellow artist with connections to the court of King Carlos the III of Spain.

Thanks to him, Goya gained work painting cartoons (blueprints) for tapestries to be displayed in court. He rapidly rose to prominence after Carlos IV took the throne, living in the palace in 1783, being appointed court artist in 1789.

He became deaf in 1792 after a severe illness. He continued to work, more assuredly. He was declared first court painter, the premier artist in Spain, in 1799. During this time he also began his first personal projects, a series of etching entitled the Caprichos (Caprices). When their satirical content proved overly controversial, prints of the Caprichos were withdrawn from sale within days of their release.

When Napoleon's armies invaded Spain in 1808, Goya worked as court painter to the occupying French forces. In his Los Desastres de la Guerra (the Disasters of War) series, begun in 1808, he depicted the conquest and its results, including the famine that struck Madrid. The results were only published after his death. He also produced allegorical paintings such as The Colossus, in which a monstrous giant looms over the landscape.

He remained court painter when Ferdinand VII regained the throne in 1814. However, he produced few commissioned paintings, among them The Second of May, 1808 at the Puerta del Sol and The Shootings of May Third 1808, which depict the execution of civilians in Madrid after an uprising against Napoleon's forces. In 1816 he produced La Tauromaquia (The Bullfight), a series of etchings of the Spanish blood sport which he had once participated in himself.

Goya created the untitled "Black Paintings" on the plaster walls of his house after another illness in 1819. Among the paintings are images from mythology and folklore depicting scenes of murder and witchcraft. His final series of etchings, Los Disparates (Follies, also Proverbos, Proverbs), which follows the Black Paintings in theme, was completed shortly before he left Spain for France to avoid being caught up in a series of trials and purges of intellectuals and republicans. He died there before dawn on April 26, 1828.

"Fantasy deserted by reason produces impossible monsters: united with it, fantasy is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders." Caption to The Sleep Of Reason produces Monsters, Capricho 43

(OOC note: The biography is taken from real life. The exhibition is a work of fiction, based in White Wolf's online rpg, New Bremen. Research and biography by tpo Tanith Marlowe.)

Links and Bibliography:

Virtual exhibition for the 250th anniversary of Goya's birth
Caprichos scans
Disasters scans
Tauromaquia scans
Disparates scans (index only)
Disparates scans (enlarged scans of seven pieces)
Black Paintings virtual exhibit