\b0 Francisco de Goya y Lucientes was born at Fuentedetodos, Aragon, in 1746. He stud
ied in JosΘ Luzan's studio in Saragossa. After a journey to Italy, he returned home in 1771 and obtained one of his first important commission, the decoration of Santa Maria del Pilar in Saragossa. In 1774, through the offices of Mengs and of his brother
-in-law, the established painter Bayeu, he was given the job of producing the cartoons for the Royal Tapestry. This activity gained him considerable attention at court and in aristocratic circles with the result that he was made a member of the Academy o
f Spain in 1780 and appointed \i pintor de cßmera\i0 , official painter to the king, in 1789. These were years of great success for Goya, who found himself in demand by the whole of the Spanish nobility, especially as a portrait painter. Despite their of
ficial character and the ceremonial fixity of the poses, his portraits display an extraordinary capacity for psychological penetration.\par
Between 1793 and 1808, Goya reached the peak of his artistic maturity, but this also marked the beginning of a pe
riod of crisis, due in part to a serious illness whose repercussions were clearly evident in his work. Alongside the portraits and genre scenes, he started to produce small pictures of far more disturbing and macabre subjects, depicting scenes of madness
, inquisition, and witchcraft. Over the following years, Goya cut himself off from the Court, withdrawing to his estate on the Manzanarre. This was the period of the splendid series of \i Caprichos\i0 .\par
With Napoleon's conquest of Spain, the most di
fficult period in the artist's life began. Although he had been in contact with pro-French circles for some time, he was deeply shocked by the savagery of the conflict: the series called \i The Disasters of War\i0 and the famous \i Shootings of May 3
\i0 bear anguished and heartbroken witness to this. With the restoration of the Bourbons he was banished from the Court for his French sympathies and returned to his country house, known as the ôQuinta del Sordo.ö His work was now almost completely filled
with agonizing, tragic, and obsessive images. In 1826 he moved to Bordeaux, leaving Spain for good and he died in the French city in 1828.\par
