The tapestry cartoons of Francisco de Goya are a group of oil on canvas paintings by Francisco de Goya between 1775 and 1792 as designs for the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Barbara near Madrid in Spain. Although they are not the only tapestry cartoons made at the Royal Factory (other painters of this factory were Mariano Salvador Maella, Antonio González Velázquez, José Camarón and José del Castillo), they are much the best known. Most of them represent bucolic, hunting, rural and popular themes. They strictly adhered to the tastes of King Charles III and the princes Charles of Bourbon and Maria Luisa of Parma, and were supervised by other artists of the factory such as Maella and the Bayeu family. Most are now in the Museo del Prado, having remained in the Spanish Royal collection, although there are some in art galleries in other countries.
After a fruitful career in his native Aragon, the renowned court painter Francisco Bayeu got his brother-in-law to go to Madrid to work on the decorative works for the royal palaces. By then, Anton Raphael Mengs was the most prominent artist at the court after Tiepolo's death in 1770. It was this employment at the court that most satisfied the ambition of Goya, and which would eventually make him the most fashionable artist for the wealthy class of Madrid. Between 1780 and 1786 he left this commission to spend his time as an artist in other private activities.
The tapestry cartoons are structured in seven series, each with a different number of works and subject matter. A common feature in all of them is the presence of rural themes and popular entertainment. Only the first one shows themes related to hunting. Once finished, the cartoons were woven into tapestry and placed in the piece for which they were intended in the royal palaces.
In 1858 they went to the basement of the Royal Palace of Madrid, where some were stolen in 1870. That year Gregorio Cruzada undertook the task of cataloging them and showing them to the public in the museum. They appeared for the first time in the official catalog of the institution in 1876. However, some small modellos (painted by Goya for the approval of the subjects) were in the hands of the Dukes of Osuna, whose descendants auctioned them in 1896. At that auction some paintings were bought by the Prado and others by collectors such as Pedro Fernández Durán and José Lázaro Galdiano, remaining in Spain.
Goya was able to grow as an artist and raise his social status through these pieces, which made him a sought-after painter in high circles in Madrid. In 1789 he obtained the position of Pintor de Cámara de Carlos IV —the former Prince— and years before he was admitted to the Academia de San Fernando.
Context
The year was 1774 and Goya was twenty-eight years old when his father, Javier Nieto, died recently. Born in Fuendetodos, a town near the Aragonese capital, one of his greatest ambitions was to settle in Madrid, the capital of the kingdom, a city that was modernizing by leaps and bounds due to the efforts of the Bourbons, a dynasty that, despite having been in power for only 70 years, had already consolidated itself completely.
Twice Goya has tried to be admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, but on both occasions the paintings he attached to his application were rejected. But the painter was able to travel to Italy, the great cultural center of the time. It was then that he painted his first great historical painting: Hannibal Seeing Italy from the Alps.Glendinning, p. 31. However, he did not do well in the competition and decided to return to his homeland, where he undertook the famous paintings of the Cartuja del Aula Dei.Triadó Tur, p. 14.
Goya marries Josefa, sister of the wealthy Bayeu painters. Some time later his brother-in-law Francisco was able to obtain a position at the court for the novice provincial painter, perhaps following orders from Mengs.Rapelli, p. 20.
Tomlinson notes that between April and December 1774, Goya was decorating the Charterhouse of Aula Dei, so he did not join the group of painters in Madrid until well into 1775. Rapelli categorically rejects this theory, stating that the Aragonese settled in the Spanish capital in December 1774.Rapelli, p. 24.
The painter will find himself in the capital with an extremely large court of artisans and painters. The Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Barbara is the center of artistic activity. The bohemian Mengs will sometimes direct Goya's work, and in his very long absences the first architect of the court, Francisco Sabatini, will do so. Occasionally Bayeu himself and Mariano Salvador Maella, another outstanding cartoon painter, would take on this role.Glendinning, p. 35.
Until 1780 he painted four series of cartoons, but that year the economic crisis forced the suspension of the supply of cartoons for the royal estancias. Then Goya decided to give his career another turn. Perhaps the desire —fueled, no doubt, by the study of his life and work — to emulate Diego Velázquez,Glendinning, p. 37. leads him to make his way as a private painter. He returns to his homeland in Aragon and paints the dome and pendentives of the Regina Martyrum of El Pilar, which will bring him into conflict with his brother-in-law Francisco and the town council of Zaragoza. In Madrid he worked as a portrait painter for high society, especially for the Dukes of Osuna. He also managed to paint for the church of Saint Francis the Great the painting Saint Bernardine of Siena Preaching before Alfonso V of Aragón and to enter the Academy of San Fernando with his best known religious work, Christ Crucified, a magnificent fusion of Velazquez's style with that of Mengs. Shortly thereafter he met the infante Luis de Borbón, brother of the king and exiled from the court as a result of his morganatic marriage. The prince became his patron and introduced him to aristocratic circles. It is very likely that Goya decided to return as a tapestry painter after the death of his protector in 1785.Triadó Tur, p. 33.
In 1786 Goya returned to the factory and painted cartoons that already denoted verism (The Snowstorm and The Wounded Mason). In the last series he painted, elements were foreshadowed —the groom with a simian face in The Wedding— that the Aragonese painter would later depict in his Caprichos.
Six years later, in 1792, Goya suffered an illness that would be the turning point of his career. He would never return to his former work as a cartoon painter, and now undertook works of a more personal nature. However, he will paint other works for the court, such as Charles IV of Spain and His Family.
Hagen evidence Goya's rise from a simple provincial painter to a full-fledged court artist. In 1786 Goya acquires his first carriage and is already a sought-after painter. He describes to his friend Zapater a trial trip, from which it is inferred that he enjoys an excellent economic situation since he belongs to the Academy of San Fernando and is about to become the King's Painter.
José Gudiol, one of the first experts in the work of the master of Fuendetodos, affirms that in Goya the indelible imprint of the courtly world and the grace of the popular world, which always alternated in the painter's mind, are mixed.Apud Buendía, p. 187.
Jeannine Baticle, another of Goya's great scholars, points out that Goya becomes "the faithful heir of the great Spanish pictorial tradition. In him, shadow and light create powerful volumes built in the impasto, clarified with brief luminous strokes in which the subtlety of the colors produces infinite variations".Apud, Triadó Tur, p. 24.
Spain at the time
The death without descendants of the last Spanish Austria, Charles II, caused a long war between the European powers that culminated with the recognition of Philip of Anjou as king of Spain under the name of Philip V. This, grandson of the Sun King, introduced French fashion in Spain, and brought Gallic artists such as Hyacinthe Rigaud and Louis-Michel Van Loo to work in the Peninsula.
From the 1730s onwards, the presence of Italians at the Madrid court became more notorious, due to the fact that Philip V's second wife, the Parmesan Isabella de Farnesio, had a great preference for the culture of the Italic Peninsula.Tomlinson, p. 9. Jacopo Amigoni and Gianbattista Tiepolo would be the most prominent Italians in Spain, but under Charles III the luck would change in favor of the Bohemian Mengs. After the death of the latter, no more foreign painter would be called to Spain, what Tomlinson (1993) calls "nationalization of Spanish painting under Charles III".Tomlinson, p. 10.
It is feasible that this nationalization of art is strongly rooted in the open hostility of the Spanish people towards foreigners, derived from the failure of the Seven Years' War. This whole movement culminated in the Motín de Esquilache, with which the enlightened Spaniards gradually displaced the French. Two examples of this were Aranda and Floridablanca.
In 1782 there was a brief attempt to put the tapestry factory in the hands of Spanish craftsmen. But the king rejected the painters' requests and handed over the management of the workshop to a Fleming named Vandergoten, supposedly a relative of the family that had founded the factory more than six decades earlier.
Dating and attribution The seven series of tapestry cartoons are composed, in total, of between 60 and 73 works. Some authors, such as Rapelli, date the paintings at 63.Rapelli, p. 21.
Juan Ramón Triadó Tur has established in his monograph on the Prado Museum an exact number of 60 cartoons, although this figure may well refer only to the number of works of this series preserved in the Madrid art gallery.Juan Ramón Triadó Tur, Museo del Prado (in Spanish), Susaeta, Madrid, 2002, p. 92.
The three leading specialists in Goya's cartoons, Nigel Glendinning, Valeriano Bozal and Janis Tomlinson, are inclined to date the series between 1775 and 1792. Considering the aforementioned six-year interval, this would result in twelve years of Goya's work at the Royal Tapestry Factory.
The size and motifs of the cartoons were intimately related to their hierarchy and the place assigned to them in the royal room. They can, therefore, be divided into panels —the most extensive compositions, which would occupy the largest space and would delimit the theme of the entire series— and other smaller cartoons destined for over doors or balconies. A letter from Goya to his friend Martín Zapater details a meeting with the sovereign and the princes in 1779, where it is stated that only the sketches for the main scenes were shown.Tomlinson, p. 12. This could explain the serious stylistic discrepancies between the main subjects and the smaller cartoons. Some authors attach great importance to the fact that the series projected in 1787 and 1791–92 were never hung as Goya had agreed.Tomlinson, p. 13.
The dating of the cartoons has not been the subject of much discussion, since the Royal Factory kept detailed records of the works, which remain to this day. However, there is a serious dating conflict for Blind Man's Bluff. Critics of the stature of Bozal and Glendinning affirm that it was made in 1789, but Tomlinson rejects this theory and proposes that it was completed before 1788, since the series to which it belonged was left unfinished when Charles III died —on December 14, 1788— and in April 1789 Goya received the longed-for appointment as painter of the chamber, so his activity in the field of cartoons would diminish drastically. The small reference guide to Goya's works in the Museo del Prado, written by Manuela de Mena, records Blind Man's Bluff as having been painted between 1788–89.Mena, p. 23.