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Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) is one of the greatest Spanish artists. His long life spanned a tumultuous epoch in his country’s history, during which progressive Enlightenment ideas from France and England came into violent conflict with Spain’s absolutist monarchy supported by an authoritarian church. Goya was born near Zaragoza, where he received his early training from a local artist and by 1774 was settled in Madrid. He eventually rose to the post of Court Painter, serving under three Bourbon kings — Charles III, Charles IV, and Ferdinand VII — as well as under Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte, who reigned during
the French occupation from 1808 to 1813. Goya produced tapestry designs, religious paintings, and brilliant portraits for his royal patrons, as well as intimate works for his enlightened friends. After a serious illness left him deaf at age forty-six, his work took a darker, more inward turn. In small paintings, drawings, and series of prints, he deployed his prodigious imagination and powers of invention in satirical commentaries on human follies and social and political issues of the day and in a searing indictment of war based on his experience of the bloody Spanish struggle
for independence from France.

Goya was a Liberal sympathizer but continued until the year before his death to collect a salary from his royal patrons. They recognized his genius and treated him with tolerance. In 1824, however, in the wake of an uprising against the monarchy, Ferdinand VII unleashed a violent purge of Liberals, and Goya applied for a leave of absence and joined a large community of Spanish exiles in Bordeaux. There he produced an intimate, experimental, and brilliant coda to his long and prolific career in Spain.