goya

I went today to the Goya portraits exhibition  at the National Gallery.  It really is in the National Gallery, tucked away down in the basement of the Sainsbury wing, and not the National Portrait Gallery, even though it consists entirely of portraits, but there you go.  I have never worked out how close the working relationship is between the two institutions, or if there might even be antipathy.  I once enquired at the NPG about the likelihood of industrial action stymieing an exhibition I was thinking about travelling up to London to see, and the person on switchboard duty that day told me conspiratorially that it was unlikely as they were not so militant at the portrait gallery as the other lot round the corner.

It doesn't matter how the Goya portraits have ended up not in the portrait gallery.  They are wonderful.  I knew virtually nothing about Goya before this show came around, and couldn't have guessed his dates (1746 - 1828) to within fifty years either way.  I had a vague feeling that his output included agonising anti-war paintings and drawings of grotesques, and no idea at all about his portraits.  It turned out that he painted royalty and the Spanish aristocracy, as well as fellow members of the artistic community of painters and writers.

They are fabulous paintings on two counts.  Goya was brilliant at textiles, lace and embroidery, velvet and silk, but more importantly he was brilliant at faces.  There is an art to find the mind's construction in the face, and render it in paint, and Goya had it.  His people practically speak, solemn, sparky, warm, approachable, or wary.  Some kings and aristocrats seemed surprisingly friendly when I would have expected Spanish royalty and senior nobility of that era to be as haughty as anything.  An educated and cultured female aristocrat looks every inch the clever radical underneath her gigantic Eliza Doolittle hat.  Some of the young gentlemen look complete handfuls that you wouldn't trust an inch.  The baby looks like a real baby, while the possibly emblematic pet cats eyeing up a little boy's magpie on a string look like the Cheshire cat.  Goya himself appears to have been a short, serious man, frowning in concentration in his own self portraits, perpetually worried even at the height of his successful career.

So hats off to the National Gallery and Francisco de Goya y Lucientes.  Between them they have piqued my interest and I want to know more about Goya and about Spanish politics in the second half of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries.  Which painters did Goya most admire, and was he a fan of Rembrandt?  And how did Goya influence following generations of artists?  One of the last works in the exhibition seems to prefigure Manet.  And what was he like as a man?  Many of his subjects are described as friends, and my companion today was sure that Goya had liked women.  Male artists don't always.

The exhibition is on until 10th January 2016, which sounds a good long time until you remember that Christmas is coming up, with all its attendant pleasures, duties, and rituals, including the withdrawal of train services from Colchester to London between Christmas Day and the New Year.