1746-1828 Goya is considered the 18th Century's foremost painter and etcher of Spanish culture, known for his realistic scenes of battles, bullfights and human corruption. Goya lived during a time of upheaval in Spain that included war with France, the Inquisition, the rule of Napoleon's brother, Joseph, as the King of Spain and, finally, the reign of the Spanish King Ferdinand VII. Experts proclaim these events -- and Goya's deafness as a result of an illness in 1793 -- as central to understanding Goya's work, which frequently depicts human misery in a satiric and sometimes nightmarish fashion. From the 1770s he was a royal court painter for Charles III and Charles IV, and when Bonaparte took the throne in 1809, Goya swore fealty to the new king. When the crown was restored to Spain's Ferdinand VII (1814), Goya, in spite of his earlier allegiance to the French king, was reinstated as royal painter. After 1824 he lived in self-imposed exile in Bordeaux until his death, reportedly because of political differences with Ferdinand. Over his long career he created hundreds of paintings, etchings, and lithographs, among them Maya Clothed and Maya Nude (1798-1800); Caprichos (1799-82); The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808 (1814); Disasters of War (1810-20); and The Black Paintings (1820-23).   Related Paintings of Francisco Goya :. | Family of Carlos IV | Countess of Altamira and her Daughter | Crowd in a Park | Maja and Celestina on a Balcony | Winter |
Related Artists:
James Gillray
English Illustrator, 1757-1815 English caricaturist and illustrator. He was essentially self-trained although he studied at the Royal Academy and on the Continent. His caricatures of the court of George III made him immensely popular. His masterly delineations, vigorous, clever, often subtle, sometimes vulgar and grotesque, numbered more than 12,000. Among his best-known cartoons are A New Way to Pay the National Debt (1796), Social Elements in Skating (1805),
Mosler, Henry
American Painter, 1841-1920 United States artist, was born in New York, the family removing to Cincinnati when he was about ten years old. Studying drawing by himself, he became a draughtsman for a comic paper, the Omnibus (Cincinnati), in 1855; in 1859-1861 he studied under James Henry Beard, and in 1862-63, during the Civil War, was an art correspondent of Harper's Weekly. In 1863 he went to Desseldorf, where for almost three years he was at the Royal Academy schools; he subsequently went to Paris, where he studied for a short time under Ernest Hebert. His "Le Retour," from the Paris Salon of 1879, was the first American picture ever bought for the Luxembourg. He received a silver medal in Paris 1889, and gold medals at Paris, 1888, and Vienna, 1893.
Juan Sanchez-Cotan
Spanish 1561-1627 S??nchez Cot??n was born in the town of Orgaz, near Toledo. He was a friend and perhaps pupil of Blas de Prado, an artist famous for his still lifes whose mannerist style with touches of realism, the disciple developed further. Cot??n began by painting altar pieces and religious works. For approximately twenty years, he pursued a successful career in Toledo as an artist, patronized by the city??s aristocracy, painting religious scenes, portraits and still lifes. These paintings found a receptive audience among the educated intellectuals of Toledo society. S??nchez Cot??n executed his notable still lifes around the turn of the seventeenth century, before the end of his secular life. An example (seen above) is Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber (1602, in the San Diego Museum of Art). On August 10, 1603, Juan Sanchez Cotan, then in his forties, closed up his workshop at Toledo to renounce the world and enter the Carthusian monastery Santa Maria de El Paular. He continued his career painting religious works with singular mysticism. In 1612 he was sent to the Granada Charterhouse, he decided to become a monk, and in the following year he entered the Carthusian monastery at Granada as a laybrother. The reasons for this are not clear, though such action was not unusual in Cot??n??s day. Cotan was a prolific religious painter whose work, carried out exclusively for his monastery, reached its peak about 1617 in the cycle of eight great narrative paintings which he painted for the cloister of the Granada Monastery. These depict the foundation of the order of St. Bruno, and the prosecution of the monks in England by the Protestants. Although the painter??s religious works have an archaic air, they also reveal a keen interest in the treatment of light and volumes, and in some respect are comparable with certain works by the Italian Luca Cambiaso whom Cotan knew at the Escorial. While Cotan's religious works are unexceptional, as a still-life painter he ranks with the great names of European painting. In spite of his retreat from the world, Cotan??s influence remained strong. His concern with the relationships among objects and with achieving the illusion of reality through the use of light and shadow was a major influence on the work of later Spanish painters such as Juan van der Hamen, Felipe Ramirez, the brothers Vincenzo and Bartolomeo Carducci and, notably, Francisco de Zurbaran. Sanchez Cotan ended his days universally loved and regarded as a saint. He died in 1627 in Granada.