Francisco Goya

Born in Aragon in 1746 to a middle-class family, Goya trained under José Luzán y Martínez from age 14, married Josefa Bayeu in 1773, and rose to court painter for the Spanish Crown by 1786, spending his early career on aristocratic portraits and Rococo tapestry cartoons for the royal palace. A severe undiagnosed illness in 1793 left him deaf, and his work grew progressively darker and more pessimistic; by 1799 he was Primer Pintor de Cámara, the highest rank, painting Charles IV of Spain and His Family and the daring La maja desnuda. Napoleon's 1807 invasion and the Peninsular War shook him deeply - though he stayed silent in public, his Disasters of War prints, The Second of May 1808, The Third of May 1808, and etchings like the Caprichos traced insanity, corruption, witches, and war with a bleak eye. Disillusioned by Spain's political and social collapse, he lived in near isolation at the Quinta del Sordo, where between 1819 and 1823 he covered the walls in the Black Paintings - raw, unsettling visions applied in oil on plaster. In 1824 he abandoned Spain for Bordeaux with his much younger companion Leocadia Weiss, completed La Tauromaquia, and died there on 1