In Art – Goya episode 2: discover Spain’s celebrated artist with this cinematic tour de force based on the National Gallery’s blockbuster exhibition Goya: The Portraits. Francisco Goya is considered the father of modern art. He was a brilliant observer of everyday life and took the genre of portraiture to new heights.
The film uses the exhibition to look in depth at Goya’s eventful life and, through extensive location footage and Goya’s revealing letters, the film builds a fascinating portrait of the painter and the extraordinary world he painted. Royalty, aristocrats, politicians and close friends were subjected to his highly modern approach that captured rapid changes of expression, gesture and emotion. Goya’s powerful vision and technical brilliance makes him one of the most admired and revered artists in the world today and indeed among the greatest painters to have ever lived.
Art – Goya episode 2
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (30 March 1746 – 16 April 1828) was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker. He is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and throughout his long career was a commentator and chronicler of his era. Immensely successful in his lifetime, Goya is often referred to as both the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns. Goya was also one of the great contemporary portraitists.
He was born to a modest family in 1746 in the village of Fuendetodos in Aragon. He studied painting from age 14 under José Luzán y Martinez and moved to Madrid to study with Anton Raphael Mengs. Goya married Josefa Bayeu in 1773; their life was characterised by an almost constant series of pregnancies and miscarriages, and only one child, a son, survived into adulthood. Goya became a court painter to the Spanish Crown in 1786 and this early portion of his career is marked by portraits of the Spanish aristocracy and royalty, and Rococo style tapestry cartoons designed for the royal palace.
