Saturday, August 6, 2016

Goya's Portraits II

Francisco Goya
Self-portrait in the workshop
ca.1790-95
oil on canvas
Museo de la Real Academia de San Fernando, Madrid

Quoted passages below are from Written Lives by Javier Marías, translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa (New Directions, 2006) 

Francisco Goya
Portrait of Mariano Goya, the artist's grandson
1812-14
oil on panel
Collection Duque de Albuquerque, Madrid

Vladimir Nabokov - "He got annoyed with people who praised art that was 'sincere and simple' or who believed that the quality of art depended on its simplicity and sincerity. For him, everything was artifice, including the most authentic and deeply felt emotions, to which he himself was not immune." 

Francisco Goya
Portrait of the Countess of Chinchón
1797-1800
oil on canvas
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Francisco Goya
Portrait of Dona Narcisa Baranana de Goicoechea
ca. 1810
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Francisco Goya
Portrait of Antonia Zárate
ca. 1805
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

Isak Dinesen - "There is no mystery in art. Do the things you can see, they will show you what you cannot see."

Francisco Goya
Portrait of a Lady with a Fan
1806-07
oil on canvas
Louvre

Francisco Goya
La Tirana
1799
oil on canvas
Museo de la Real Academia de San Fernando, Madrid

Djuna Barnes - "I like my human experience served up with a little silence and restraint. Silence makes experience go further, and, when it does die, gives it that dignity common to a thing one had touched and not vanished."

Francisco Goya
Cardinal Luís María de Borbón y Vallabriga
1790s
oil on canvas
Museu de Arte, São Paulo

Francisco Goya
Les Jeunes
1812-14
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille

Francisco Goya
Yard of a Madhouse
1794
oil on tinplate
Meadows Museum, Dallas

Oscar Wilde - "Later, he seemed to take these words literally, after leaving the prison in which he had spent two years doing hard labor. Although it was clear that if he wrote a new comedy or novel, money would rain down on him and his poverty would be at an end, he had neither the strength nor the will to write. As he put it, he had known suffering and could not sing its praises; he hated it, but he had known it, and that was why he could not now sing the praises of what had always hitherto inspired him : pleasure and joy." 


Francisco Goya
Prison Scene
1810-14
oil on zinc
Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, Durham

Francisco Goya
Miracle of St Anthony
1798
ceiling fresco
San Antonio de la Florida, Madrid

Francisco Goya
Second of May, 1808 - The Charge of the Mamelukes
1814
oil on canvas
Prado

Francisco Goya
Allegory of the City of Madrid
1810
oil on canvas
Museo Municipal, Madrid

Thomas Mann - "The sad thing is that he really believed that he did not take himself seriously, when what leaps out at you, from novels, essays, letters and diaries alike, is his utter belief in his own immortality." 

Francisco Goya
Duchess of Alba arranging her hair
1796-97
drawing
Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid