Curiously enough, this Goya, who from the first plucked success from its thorny setting, was soon forgotten, and until Gautier in 1840 recorded his impressions in his brilliant Voyage en Espagne, critical literature did not much concern itself with the versatile Spaniard.  And Gautier’s sketch of a few pages still remains the most comprehensive estimate.  From it all have been forced to borrow; Richard Muther in his briskly enthusiastic monograph and the section in his valuable History of Modern Painting; Charles Yriarte, Will Rothenstein, Lafond, Lefort, Conde de la Vinaza—­all have read Gautier to advantage.  Valerian von Loga has devoted a study to the etchings, and Don Juan de la Rada has made a study of the frescoes in the church of San Antonio de la Florida; Carl Justi, Stirling Maxwell, C.G.  Hartley should also be consulted.  Yriarte is interesting, inasmuch as he deals with the apparition of Goya in Rome, an outlaw, but a blithe one, who, notebook in hand, went through the Trastevere district sketching with ferocious rapidity the attitudes and gestures of the vivacious population.  A man after Stendhal’s heart, this Spaniard.  And in view of his private life one is tempted to add—­and after the heart, too, of Casanova.  Notwithstanding, he was an unrivalled interpreter of child-life.  Some of his painted children are of a dazzling sweetness.

GOYA

II

Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes was born March 30 (or 31), 1746, at Fuentetodos, near Saragossa, Aragon.  He died at Bordeaux, France, where he had gone for his health, April 16, 1828—­Calvert, possibly by a pen slip, makes him expire a month earlier.  He saw the beginnings of French romanticism, as he was himself a witness of the decadence of Spanish art.  But his spirit has lived on in Manet and Zuloaga.  Decadent he was; a romantic before French romanticism, he yet had borrowed from an earlier France.  Some of his gay Fetes Champetres recall the influence of Watteau—­a Watteau without the sweet elegiac strain.  He has been called a Spanish Hogarth—­not a happy simile.  Hogarth preaches; Goya never; satirists both, Goya never deepened by a pen stroke the didactic side.  His youth was not extraordinary in promise; his father and mother were poor peasants.  The story of his discovery by a monk of Saragosela—­Father Felix Salvador of the Carthusian convent of Aula Dei—­is not missing.  He studied with Jose Martinez.  He ran away in 1766.  He remained, say some, in Italy from 1769 to 1774; but in 1771 he appeared in Saragossa again, and the year 1772 saw him competing for the painting about to be undertaken in the cathedral.  He married Josefa Bayeu, the sister of the court painter.  He has told us what he thought of his jealous, intriguing brother-in-law in a portrait.  In 1775 he was at Madrid.  From 1776 he executed forty-six tapestry cartoons.  In 1779 he presented to the king his etchings after Velasquez.  His rise was rapid.  He painted the queen, with her false teeth, false hair, and her infernal simper, and this portrait was acclaimed a masterpiece.