The Postcard
A postally unused postcard that was extracted from a book of 30 Goya postcards that was published by Magna Books.
Winter
Winter is one of Francisco Goya’s early works. Most scholars tend to associate Goya with his darker, more experimental works produced in the latter part of his career.
Goya’s early works, produced while he worked as a court painter, tend to be much more conventional. Although, like all of Goya’s art, they contain surprising undertones and messages.
Winter is a tapestry cartoon. Tapestry cartoons are essentially models for weavers, who create the tapestry based on the artist’s cartoon. Goya designed dozens of tapestries for the Spanish royal court.
The piece depicts a group of peasants walking across a snowy landscape. They are wrapped in cloaks and shivering in the cold. As the Prado Museum describes the cartoon:
“They carry nothing, and their gazes reveal that
they are cold and hungry. Two other, better-dressed
figures - probably servants from some manor house -
carry an enormous pig that has been gutted.”
The tension between these two groups of figures contains a message about society. Goya uses this painting to explore the dynamic between the haves and have-nots. The way different members of society behaved towards each other was an endlessly interesting topic to Goya.
Winter explores the poverty and hunger of these peasants -heightened by the cold and blustery weather - while contrasting it with the comparative prosperity of the two servants. Set against the backdrop of the harshness of winter, Goya’s painting ask why some have so little when others have so much.
Francisco de Goya
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker. He is considered to be the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th. and early 19th. centuries.
His paintings, drawings, and engravings reflected contemporary historical upheavals, and influenced important 19th.- and 20th.-century painters.
Goya is often referred to as the last of the Old Masters and the first of the Moderns.
Goya was born to a middle-class family on the 30th. March 1746 in Fuendetodos in Aragon. He studied painting from the age of 14 under José Luzán y Martinez, and moved to Madrid to study with Anton Raphael Mengs.
He married Josefa Bayeu in 1773. Goya became a court painter to the Spanish Crown in 1786, and this early portion of his career is marked by portraits of Spanish aristocracy and royalty, and Rococo-style tapestry cartoons designed for the royal palace.
Although Goya's letters and writings survive, little is known about his thoughts. He had a severe and undiagnosed illness in 1793 that left him deaf, after which his work became progressively darker and more pessimistic.
His later easel and mural paintings, prints and drawings appear to reflect a bleak outlook on personal, social and political levels, and contrast with his social climbing.
He was appointed Director of the Royal Academy in 1795, the year Manuel Godoy made an unfavorable treaty with France.
In 1799, Goya became Primer Pintor de Cámara, the highest rank for a Spanish court painter.
In the late 1790's he completed his La Maja Desnuda, a remarkably daring nude for the time, and clearly indebted to Diego Velázquez. In 1800–01, he painted Charles IV of Spain and his family, also influenced by Velázquez.
In 1807, Napoleon led the French army into the Peninsular War against Spain. Goya remained in Madrid during the war, which seems to have affected him deeply. Although he did not speak his thoughts in public, they can be inferred from his Disasters of War series of prints (although published 35 years after his death) and his 1814 paintings The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808.
Other works from his mid-period include the Caprichos and Los Disparates etching series, and a wide variety of paintings concerned with insanity, mental asylums, witches, fantastical creatures and religious and political corruption, all of which suggest that he feared for both his country's fate and his own mental and physical health.
His late period culminates with the Black Paintings of 1819–1823, applied to the plaster walls of his house the Quinta del Sordo (House of the Deaf Man) where, disillusioned by political and social developments in Spain, he lived in near isolation.
Goya eventually abandoned Spain in 1824 to retire to the French city of Bordeaux, accompanied by his much younger maid and companion, Leocadia Weiss, who may have been his lover.
There he completed his La Tauromaquia series and a number of other works. Following a stroke that left him paralyzed on his right side, Goya died on the 16th. April 1828 aged 82.
