CERTAIN GOYAS IN AMERICA

FRANCISCO GOYA Y LUCIENTES, 1746-1828

By Helen Churchill Candee

ILLUSTRATED WITH REPRODUCTIONS OF PICTURES IN FAMOUS PRIVATE COLLECTIONS

HE fascinating story of Francisco Goya many have written in many volumes, but it is most subtly yet frankly laid before us in the rich store of his paintings that have come to rest in America. More than with almost any other artist his life's experiences and exigencies show in his works. They are writ plain for all to read. And it is a writing that all keenly desire to divine, so full is it of vitality, of surprises, of strong contrasts, of such contradictions as brutality and sensitiveness, of suavity and rudeness, and of such opposites as peasant homeliness and patrician grace.

Goya's works, Goya's character, and Goya's times-this is the inseparable trinity involved in understanding with keen enjoyment the paintings of this master whose vogue in America is ever increasing. Spanish art is one of our present enthusiasms, and one none the less discriminating because of such appreciators at last winter's exhibition as she who preferred the last-named of the three living exponents, Sorolla, Zuloaga, and Goya!

Goya's moods were so many and all of them so marked that each one declares a different facet of the many-sided character as well as a different talent. This piques the character-reader and shocks him out of set formula. Compare the virile "Forge" (frontispiece) of Mr. Henry C. Frick's collection with the exquisite patrician delicacy of Mr. Philip Lehman's Countess of Altamira"; or The Hispanic Society's sketch for the terrible "Third of May, 1808," with Mr. Claggett Wilson's "Duke of Osuna." In the two groups are expressed all that is powerful, intense, and tragic, and this is done with a technique that accords with the subject as though some special pigment had been slapped onto the canvas and

some fearful hand and eye had traced the forceful lines.

But in the two portraits of aristocrats another Goya shows himself-not the passionate man whose youthful escapades familiarized him with the elemental life of his countrymen, but the Goya of ambition who had learned that on aristocratic favor depended an artist's success, a Goya to whom life had shown a world of elegance in which human feelings were gracefully hid by manners as exquisite as was the dress which hid the physical.

More even than most painters Goya put his own traits of character, his own personality, into his paintings. They seem built of the very fibre of his soul. It is as though his brush were dipped alternately in his heart's blood and in his brain's fire. And, according as the sitter or model affected him, these vital pigments were bitter and savage or tender and warm.

He was born a man of the people. That gave him his superb physical strength. But from the temper of Spain itself he received a fiery, complex nervous organization. At times the nerves drove the force as a picador drives a bull, and then were produced those vivid presentments of sudden strength, of rich power, such as Goya produced in "The Forge." Somewhere his eye had seen those forms in all their powerful activity, their brutal heads drawn in accord with their bodies, conscious like their bodies of but one thing, physical strength and its ardent exercise.

To his association with the common people Goya owes the richness of his art. Tales of his young manhood show him to have taken part in the life of the time, with no disposition to shirk adventure. His companions were men of the bullring, of the theatre, as well as the Mayas who ornament their stratum of Peninsular society. One adventure nearly costing his life through a dagger thrust, he disappeared in an Italian voyage, and in Rome