De Goya Dies

Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) was a Spanish painter and printmaker who served as court artist to the Spanish crown while developing a profoundly personal and often unsettling vision. He died in 1828 in Bordeaux, France, where he had settled in self-imposed exile during his final years.

Among his best-known works are the paired paintings La maja desnuda and La maja vestida (the Nude Maja and the Clothed Maja), depicting the same reclining woman unclothed and dressed. He also produced penetrating royal portraits, the print series Los Caprichos and The Disasters of War, and the haunting late murals known as the Black Paintings.

Goya's career bridged the courtly elegance of the eighteenth century and the darker, more subjective concerns of the modern age. His unflinching treatment of violence, superstition, and human folly led many later critics to regard him as a forerunner of both Romanticism and modern art.