Francisco Goya

Spanish court painter who slowly reinvented himself as the first great modern witness to political violence. Goya served four kings and produced flattering official portraits, but his private work — the Caprichos etchings, the Disasters of War, the Black Paintings he murals on the walls of his own house — is bleak, satirical and unsparing. A serious illness in 1793 left him deaf, and the silence seems to have sharpened his interest in dreams, nightmares and the irrationality of crowds. He died in self-imposed exile in Bordeaux at eighty-two.