Word: goya
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...Naked Emperors. Goya's foreign contemporaries -Guardi, Gainsborough, Fragonard-specialized in elegance. Goya did too, but instinctively pricked the bubbles he blew, fastening on the frivolous, pompous and stupid personalities inside the fine clothes of his noble sitters. Like the naked emperor of the fable, they seemed not to notice. Charles IV made him court painter and gave him a carriage. Occasionally Goya was commissioned to portray a beautiful woman, which enabled him to exhibit a warmer side. Friends who sat for him got off lightly; he could still admire...
...Goya himself had five children, money in the bank and a gay life-"Everything I could wish for," as he wrote to a friend...
Some say it was syphilis, a theory which accords with Goya's rakehell reputation...
Whatever the illness, it deafened him completely. While convalescing, Goya painted the first of his many hellish fantasies-only, as he wrote, "to occupy my imagination, which was troubled by the consideration of my ills." With deceptive modesty, he noted that in his new pictures he had "succeeded in making observations for which my commissioned works, in which fantasy and invention had no place, never gave the opportunity." What actually happened was far more important...
...Goya had wriggled out of his old, gregarious personality. He emerged as the dour genius the world now knows. In the fading, Baroque art of Goya's day, charm was the watchword. Goya brushed charm aside; he no longer cared to please. Throughout his career, he had listened to others' orders and carried them out amiably enough. Now he no longer heard his orders; he gradually ceased to obey, and even to reply. Except for official portraits, Goya's art stopped being a succession of answers to the world's demands and became simply statements...