London

by XAVIER F. SALOMON

Madrid, around 1785, had a population of about 150,000 citizens, and it was said that because all the noble families were related, members of the aristocracy addressed each other as ‘cousin’. It is precisely this closely knit social network that provides the background to the splendid exhibition Goya. The Portraits at the National Gallery, London (to 10th January). About a third of Goya’s known works are portraits, and his astounding images span three generations of Spanish society. This was one of the most tumultuous and complex times in Spanish history, a period of forty years which saw the traditions of the ancien régime give way to a new world. In Spain, like in no other European nation, this shift was traumatic, creating a protracted combat between the dark forces that had their roots in the Middle Ages – religion, the Inquisition and absolute monarchy – and the Enlightenment – science and democracy – that was beginning to sweep through the Iberian peninsula. Goya was caught up in this world, an observer, participant and, more importantly for us, an outstanding witness. Arguably Goya’s greatest artistic achievements were not in the field of portraiture, and his absolute masterpieces are the Second of May and the Third of May 1808, the Caprichos and Disasters of war, the tapestry cartoons and the black paintings for the Quinta del Sordo. The exhibition in London, however, brings to the fore another important aspect of the painter’s art, and literally provides us with the faces of Goya’s age.

Never before has Goya’s circle been shown together so effectively. This is a deeply human and moving exhibition that goes beyond the simplistic acknowledgment of the artist’s skill as a portraitist. The portraits in this exhibition, beautifully installed, speak to one another and to us, providing a tangible link to the past. The range of Goya’s portraits spans the Spanish royal family, the aristocrats he was trying to impress at the beginning of his career, some of whom later became friends, the intellectuals that he knew and admired, intimate friends on whom the painter relied, and his family that provided the constant, and possibly disappointing, backdrop to his life. The chronology of the exhibition moves from the dazzling aristocratic world of the 1780s and 1790s to the private circle of friends at the end of Goya’s life. As Enlightened forces attempted, and failed, to transform Spain into a modern country, Goya’s portraits progressively became more lonely and dark, moving from the apparently light and easy world of the late-eighteenth century aristocracy to the dark and troubled birth of the bourgeoisie in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Surprisingly, only one previous volume has been dedicated solely to the topic of Goya’s portraits.1 The book that accompanies this exhibition, by Xavier Bray, is, therefore, a ­significant contribution to Goya studies and will become a fundamental reference text.2 One of the main strengths of the exhibition is the curator’s rigorous selection of works, which includes well-known masterpieces and important loans – the Prado has generously lent ten paintings and these are accompanied by fifteen works from private collections. It cannot be emphasised enough what a unique occasion this is to see these portraits, alone and as a group, many of which have left Spain for the first time.

The exhibition’s narrative is broadly speaking chronological, but each room focuses on a specific aspect of Goya’s portraiture. His first large commissioned portrait, that of the Count of Floridablanca (cat. no.3), opens the exhibition, together with one of Goya’s early masterpieces, the Family of the Infante Don Luis de Borbón (no.8). This large canvas has been the centre of recent dossier exhibitions, but its iconography is ultimately mysterious: most of the peripheral figures remain to be identified.3 The central position of the barber, Santos Garcia, dressing the hair of the Infante’s wife, María Teresa de Vallabriga y Rozas, recalls the role of a more famous barber, Figaro, in Beaumarchais’s play and Mozart’s and Rossini’s operas. During the two summers, of 1783 and 1784, that Goya spent at the Infante’s exiled court at Arenas de San Pedro, he produced many portraits, four of which (nos.4–7) are reunited with the large group portrait.

Family reunions are the subject of the ­second room, where members of the Altamira (nos.11–13) and Osuna (nos.14–16) families are displayed. They are accompanied by other relatives, the Dowager Marchioness of Villafranca (no.22) and the Duke of Alba (no.21), who were respectively the mother and brother of the Countess of Altamira (no.13); and Don Valentín Bellvís de Moncada y Pizarro (no.18; Fig.50), a brother-in-law of the Villafrancas.4 Such family connections appear throughout the exhibition, and the short biographies in the catalogue (pp.229–41) are particularly useful. This room also raises the important issue of conservation when examining Goya’s paintings. An astonishing number of portraits in the exhibition survive in pristine condition and unlined (nos.1, 7, 16, 31–36, 53 and 58) and they show how compromised other paintings can be, especially when past cleanings have damaged their delicate surfaces. In this room, the well-preserved portraits of the Osuna family (especially nos.14 and 16), and that of the Marquis of San Adrián (no.35), underline the sad state of the portraits of the Countess of Altamira (no.13) and Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga (no.11), both from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, that of Osorio having been transferred to another canvas in a dangerous and unfortunately common exercise in nineteenth-century France. The mask-like face of the Countess of Altamira must have once been as delicately painted as that of the more or less contemporary Countess-Duchess of Benavente (no.14).

In the next room a group of Enlightened afrancesados (French sympathisers) is united around the impossibly dashing French ­ambassador, Ferdinand Guillemardet (no.30). Particularly beautiful is the juxtaposition of the portraits of the two ministers (of Justice and of Finance) Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos (no.26) and Francisco de Saavedra (no.27), which may have originally been intended as pendants. The melancholy Jovellanos rests his elbow on a console table decorated with bucrania. This and Saavedra’s more sombre desk highlight an aspect of Goya’s portraits that has been little studied: the furniture and decorative arts in his canvases. Some can be tentatively linked to specific designers; for example, it is likely that the table in the ­portrait of Luis María de Borbón y Vallabriga (no.7) was designed by his father’s architect, Ventura Rodríguez (no.9). The chair in which the ambassador Guillemardet sits is as distinctive as the Countess of Altamira’s turquoise and gold sofa. Thérèse Louise de Sureda’s Egyptian-style Neo-classical chair (no.42) is as fashionable and chic as her owner. The Duke of Alba’s Haydn score and his ­violin (no.21) echo the fortepiano on which he leans, just as the large gilt-bronze clock in the portrait of the Count of Floridablanca (no.3) and the inkwell in that of the Count of Altamira (no.12) highlight the roles of the minister and banker and their relationship to time and writing.

Costume is fundamental in Goya’s portraits. The most impressive grouping is in the fourth room, devoted to the Spanish court at the turn of the nineteenth century. Three astounding full-length portraits show Queen María Luisa (no.32), the Countess of Fernán Núñez (no.33) and the Duchess of Alba (no.24; Fig.49), all enveloped in the rich fabric of their mantillas, playing on versions of the ­popular Spanish costumes of the majas. The Queen may have spent a fortune on Flemish lace, but she is not as regal as Alba – the quintessential depiction of a Spanish aristocrat, proud in her devastating beauty. The Countess of Fernán Núñez, known at the time for her small intellect, is no match for her neighbours. The portrait of her husband (Fig.51), on the other hand, must be the most elegant image in the exhibition, if not of all Goya portraits. This group of portraits, together with the ­earlier portrait of Charles III (no.1), are perfect examples of Goya’s capacity to depict, with a few abstract brushstrokes, the arid landscape of Spain. The canvases exude the dry heat of the scorched land surrounding Madrid, mainly used by the king and his courtiers for their favourite pastime, hunting.

The final three rooms of the exhibition bring us to the core of the political turmoil in Spain in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. The National Gallery’s Duke of Wellington (no.57) is shown next to its related drawing from the British Museum (no.54). In the same room Cardinal Luis María de ­Borbón y Vallabriga (no.52) towers above a group of portraits of liberals and despots. He had been portrayed as a child fifteen years ­earlier, individually (no.7) and with his family (no.8). On many occasions Goya portrayed the same sitter several times over long intervals: another instance is one of the young girls in the Duke and Duchess of Osuna and their children (no.16), who grew up to become the seductive Marchioness of Santa Cruz (no.36). As the political world around Goya shifted and his youthful hopes were dashed by the return of reactionary governments under ­Ferdinand VII, the painter retreated into the quieter world of his friends and family. Some of the most touching images in the exhibition are in the last two rooms, those of Goya’s lifelong friend Martín Zapater (no.37), of Goya’s wife (no.51), son (nos. 45, 65) and grandson Mariano (no.70), and the series of six miniatures of his in-laws, the Goicoechea family, (nos.45–50). Towards the end of his life, Goya seems to have experimented with different formats and media, miniatures, but also lithographs (no.69) and red and black chalk drawings (nos.51, 54 and 65). Most beautiful among them is the small drawing of Francisco Otín (Fig.52), in its medallic format, the idea for which possibly derived from the sitter’s own collection of medals.

Between October 1792 and February 1793 Goya almost died of an enigmatic illness that left him deaf. From this moment onwards his world was silent, and the portraits assume a different meaning when one imagines the silence in which they were created. Like Goya, we cannot hear the sitters’ voices, and can judge their characters from their features alone. We know that Goya could portray a sitter astoundingly fast: inscriptions on the paintings record that the profile portrait of Don Luis (no.4) was painted in three hours on the morning of 11th September 1783 and that of his wife (p.41, fig.21) in one hour on 27th August of that same year. The series of sketches for the large Family of Charles IV (Prado, Madrid) of 1800 were also produced in a few hours each. The immediacy of many of these works is still palpable.

In recent years Goya scholarship has been beset by divisive opinions on attribution. Many works traditionally attributed to the artist have been demoted, and many still linger in an attributional limbo. Bray wisely stayed clear of these issues and selected a group of portraits of undisputed quality and attribution. But the question remains for those works attributed to Goya of lower quality and in a compromised state of conservation. Were these produced by assistants and collaborators (such as Agustín Esteve y Marqués), were they simply later pastiches and copies, or should we concede that even an artist such as Goya may have been uneven in his production? Some inferior works were clearly produced by Goya, and we need to know more about the painters who collaborated with him, and how. Some of these questions should be considered when looking at the display in the National Gallery’s Room 1, Goya’s Portrait of Doña Isabel de Porcel. A question of Attribution (to 10th January). The portrait was bought as a Goya in 1896 and has recently undergone technical analysis. Clearly painted over a re-used canvas of what appears to be a male portrait by Goya of the mid-1790s, the portrait, with its coarse and brash paint application, looks different from most of Goya’s portraits. The heavy make-up of Doña Isabel looks similar to that used on the face of the Clothed Maja, a painting that is appreciably of lower quality than the earlier Naked Maja. Parts of Isabel’s outfit – the white shirt, the pink bodice and black lace – are also similar in handling to those of the Clothed Maja. The display does not attempt to reach a conclusion.

Proudly standing on Iberian soil, the Duchess of Alba looks out at the viewer while pointing with her finger to the floor. In the reddish sand an invisible hand has inscribed in large italic letters: ‘Solo Goya’. This exquisitely curated exhibition demonstrates that indeed there was ‘only Goya’.

1     E. du Gué Trapier: Goya and his Sitters. A Study of his Style as a Portraitist, New York 1964.

2     Catalogue: Goya. The Portraits. Edited by Xavier Bray, with contributions by the editor, Manuela B. Mena Marqués, Thomas Gayford, Allison Goudie and Juliet Wilson-Bareau. 272 pp. incl. 160 col. ills. (The National Gallery, London, 2015), £35 (HB). ISBN 978–1–85709–573–9.

3     For the most recent exhibition on the painting, see F. Calvo Serraller, ed.: exh. cat. Goya y el Infante Don Luis: el exilio y el reino, Madrid (Palacio Real) 2012, reviewed in this Magazine, 155 (2013), pp.127–28.

4     This portrait is exhibited for the first time after its recent rediscovery; X. Bray: ‘El hombre de blanco: un nuevo Goya’, Ars Magazine 28 (2015), pp.66–76 and 152–54.