Artist to Nobility
1783-1791
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Goya and Children
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I have a four-year-old son who is so beautiful that people in the
streets of Madrid turn round to look at him. He was so ill that I
stopped living for that whole period. Thank God he's better now.
Goya to Martin Zapater
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Francisco de Goya
Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuniga
1788
Oil on canvas, 127 x 101 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
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Children's lives, children's games
Between 1775 and 1784, Goya's wife Josefa gave birth
to six children, but only the last-born son, Javier, survived. Goya always
had a special relationship with children, he painted his grandson
Mariano several times and even at an advanced age he drew pictures
for the daughter of Leocadia Weiss, his companion. His first
portraits of children were executed for aristocratic patrons who
wanted to have portraits of their heirs as well as of themselves.
Goya's first child portrait, painted in 1783, was of Maria Teresa,
the two-year-old daughter of his patron Don Luis de Borbon. Many
years later he painted her a second time, as the young Countess of
Chinchon.
The portrait of the four-year-old Manuel Osorio is one of Goya's
most famous works.The luminous red of
his costume makes the pale, serious-looking boy, who was at that
time the same age as Goya's own son, look all the more delicate. The
background is indistinct. The light falls diagonally, emphasizing the
boy's head. Goya added his signature to the card held in the magpie's
beak. Three cats are staring through the darkness at the magpie,
which the boy is holding on a thin lead. Is this a reference to the
passing of childhood innocence, and the captive bird a symbol of the
child's restricted freedom? Perhaps; but we have to remember that in
those days it was perfectly normal to give children animals as
playthings.
Goya was able to capture the child's personality with great
sensitivity, transcending the purely representational portrayal. His
portraits always show a great deal of tenderness for children, who
were expected to display fitting dignity and composure from a very
early age. The contrast between the child as a child, and the child as
an actor in the elaborate and imposing ceremonies that were an
inescapable aspect of court life had already been demonstrated by
Velazquez in his portraits of the royal children. Goya had studied
these works in detail.
Goya also depicted the children of the lower social orders in small
genre paintings and tapestry designs. Not as pampered as the
children of the aristocracy, they romp about in ragged clothing,
under the open sky; they scuffle and tussle, they play leapfrog, and
steal eggs from birds' nests. Often their games imitate the life of
the grown-ups: they play soldiers and bullfighters. In the 17th
century the Spanish painter
Bartolome
Esteban Murillo (1618-1682)
had used street children, eating or playing, as subjects for his
paintings. Goya's paintings, however, are more in the tradition of
the Dutch genre paintings, which were known in Spain.
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Francisco de Goya
Children's Games
1777-1785
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The terrors of childhood
But Goya also expressed the darker aspects of childhood. Even in his
official portraits of children there is often something like sadness
in their expression, or a look of surprised incomprehension of the adult
world. Every adult can remember the fears of childhood, the fear of
punishment or of inexplicable things, of the bogeyman or darkness.
Goya tries to depict these fears in several of the pages of his
series of Caprichos. At the same time, he implies
criticism of brutal and absurd methods of child-rearing, and exposes
adults who exploit their power over children. On one page, entitled
But he broke the vase, an angry old woman is thrashing her child as
though possessed. Goya's laconic comment is: "The
son is naughty, the mother bad-tempered. Which is worse?" Another
page shows the terror of a child confronted with a weird figure
draped in a white cloth, a figure used by adults to frighten children. In Goya's time there was a good deal of
discussion in Spain about the childrearing reforms of the
Enlightenment. He himself designed the title page for the Spanish
edition of a book by the Swiss reformist teacher Johann Pestalozzi
(1746-1827),and he painted a shield for the Royal Pestalozzi School
founded in Madrid in 1806.
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Francisco de Goya
Children's Games
1777-1785
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Francisco de Goya
Children's Games
1777-1785
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Francisco de Goya
Children's Games
1777-1785
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Francisco de Goya
Children's Games
1777-1785
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Francisco de Goya
Children's Games
1777-1785
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Francisco de Goya
Children's Games
1777-1785
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 Francisco de Goya
Los pobres en la fuente
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 Francisco de Goya
Clara de Soria
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 Francisco de Goya
El columpio
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 Francisco de Goya
Vicente Osorio de Moscoso |
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