Francisco Goya

Court painter to the Spanish crown and simultaneously the first great modern witness to political violence, social folly and the nightmares of an overturned world. Goya's career has two distinct phases and a rupture between them: the first, a conventional rise through the court art hierarchy — tapestry cartoons, portraits, official commissions for Charles III and Charles IV — characterized by vivid color and an Enlightenment confidence in human reason; the second, after a devastating illness in 1792–93 that left him permanently deaf, a progressive darkening into satire, horror and social criticism that has no real precedent in European painting. The work he produced in private, never intending for public exhibition, tracks the deepening of this darkness: the Caprichos (1799), eighty aquatint etchings of social folly and Inquisitorial terror, published anonymously; the Disasters of War (1810–20), a record of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain made from direct observation that constitutes perhaps the most honest body of anti-war imagery ever produced; and the Black Paintings (c. 1819–23), murals he applied directly to the walls of his own house outside Madrid in old age — a private nightmare of Saturn devouring his son, a witches' sabbath, fighting peasants, pilgrims — that anticipate 20th-century Expressionism in their naked emotional violence. Goya died in 1828 in self-imposed exile in Bordeaux, having fled Spain after the restoration of Ferdinand VII, whose repression of liberalism he had witnessed and recorded. The Black Paintings were transferred from the walls to canvas in the 1870s and are now in the Prado. His influence has been continuous and enormous: Manet, Daumier, Baudelaire and eventually Picasso all claimed him; the Disasters of War is still referenced by every major documentary photographer working in conflict zones.