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Today, March 30, is Francisco Goya’s birth anniversary.

Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1808 put Francisco Goya in a bind. Like many other Spanish liberals, he had hailed the French Revolution, and was euphoric about its early, heroic phase. He had also hoped that the Revolution’s emancipatory message would powerfully exercise the Spanish imagination, helping reform and galvanise the corrupt, moribund Spanish state that Goya had come to loathe. But equally, he had an instinctive distrust of authority, and sensed that a regime that ruled by the sword – as the French, an occupying power, was obliged to do in Spain – could hardly be a truly liberating force, even if it had the noblest intentions. 

And ordinary Spaniards found plenty of reasons to resent the new order, including the cloak-and-dagger manoeuvres via which Napoleon installed Joseph Bonaparte, his elder brother, as the new monarch in Madrid. Soon enough, French troops were violently putting down sporadic bursts of resistance erupting across Madrid and other places – until the scattered and often leaderless popular uprisings coalesced into the broader Peninsular War (1808-14) in which the Spanish, Portuguese, and British armies confronted and eventually ejected the French from Spain, restoring the Bourbons to the throne. Civilian Spanish resistance to French rule persisted through the war years with varying intensity and was brutally subdued in most cases. Goya knew what was happening around him, of course, but, hobbled by a near-total loss of hearing and his body battered by recurring illnesses, the sixty-two-year old painter experienced much of that at a certain remove (but for a short visit to strife-torn Zaragova where he might possibly have witnessed some of the horrors of the war at first hand). His later work, though, seemed to belie that enforced distance between the artist and his subject. Indeed, one of the plates (bearing number 44 out of a total of 80) making up the series of etchings we will talk about presently – the series that posterity came to know by the title Los desastres de la guerra (the disasters of war), is captioned Yo lo vi (‘I saw it’).

As conflicted as Goya’s sympathies were, however, he yet elected to stay on as the royal court’s top painter, pledging allegiance to Joseph, the new monarch. Not surprisingly, he was less than prolific during these years, performing his court duties punctiliously, but not with any particular enthusiasm. He drew and sketched as the fancy took him, rendering his impressions and his feelings about the ongoing bloodletting to paper, but stowed much of his work away for the time being, even as he scrupulously attended to royal and other commissions that came his way. It was during this interregnum that Goya started work on his Disasters… series, though it was not until 1820 that he was done with them. 

But what kept Goya preoccupied during the artistically lean years of the Napoleonic occupation burst forth in the open courtesy of two monumental canvases he completed soon after the French army had been driven out of Spain: The Second of May, 1808 and The Third of May, 1808. Both showed Madrid turned upside-down by strife. In Second.., exasperated Madrilenians fall upon their French tormentors with savage fury, while the other painting memorialises the extraordinarily vicious French reprisals. But, though commissioned by the court as a tribute to heroic Spanish........

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