his distaste for women because he believes that women's duty is no more than a wife and a mother

his distaste for women because he believes that women

His family’s security preoccupied him throughout his career, though he often chafed at their demands. His wife, Josefa Bayeu, came from a dynasty of artists, and was accustomed to comfortable Madrid living. His father, a gilder, had died impoverished and intestate, leaving him to look after his mother and the extended family. But he couldn’t cut his ties to Zaragoza. Goya’s letters rage at the ‘shameful indignity’ with which he was treated, like ‘a mere executor and dependant’. To make matters worse, the church authorities appealed to his mentor and brother-in-law, Francisco Bayeu, to touch up the unhappy composition. Yet in 1781 his fresco of Mary, Queen of Martyrs for the basilica was rejected by the building committee – a slight he didn’t forget. Goya’s first big opportunity as an artist came in 1772, with a commission to paint the choir vault in the magnificent basilica of El Pilar in Zaragoza. ‘I saw her, Orosia Morena, in Zaragoza because she knew how to make mice.’ He revisited the event in a drawing made decades later, at a time when the abolition of the Inquisition was under discussion: ‘They put a gag on her because she spoke and they hit her in the face,’ he wrote in the caption. In 1760, aged fourteen, Goya watched the auto-da-fé of a local woman accused of practising sorcery. Sometimes these memories were unpleasant. Zaragoza provided the sights that he drew on throughout his career, including bullfights, religious processions and the local hospital (Zaragoza was exceptional in mid-18th-century Spain in having a doctor who specialised in mental illness). Although he relocated to Madrid in 1775, he continued to identify as an Aragonese, and even gave his hometown its Latinised title, Cesaraugustano, in signing his altarpiece for Seville cathedral in 1817. His early years in Zaragoza, where his family moved a month after he was born in 1746, were of enduring importance. Impatient with the critical tendency to cast Goya as a proto-modernist, Janet Tomlinson’s new biography restores him to his own times. An unsparing exhibition at Agen in 2019 examined the role of studio assistants in making copies under Goya’s direction, and the unsavoury efforts of his descendants to fabricate lucrative pastiches. This cull has claimed yet more works, with fierce debates over the status of the Colossus – a monstrous allegory of the Napoleonic invasion, held by the Prado but downgraded in 2008 – and the Balloon, a one-time star attraction of the museum in Agen. In the 1990s, the number of small format paintings attributed to him was slashed from three hundred to 112. Academic scrutiny of his studio inventories has considerably shrunk the Goya corpus. In recent years, reflections on Goya’s moral achievement have been replaced by a more rigorous and technical assessment of his style. ‘Witches’ Sabbath’ (1798) from Goya’s series for the Duchess of Osuna.

His distaste for women because he believes that women's duty is no more than a wife and a mother