The Spanish painter (1746–1828) who rose from provincial Aragon to become first painter to the crown, then, after a severe illness left him deaf around 1792, turned his genius on war, superstition, and madness. His unflinching royal portraits, the satirical print series Los Caprichos, the war prints of The Disasters of War, the execution scene The Third of May 1808, and the nightmarish Black Paintings of his final years make him a hinge of art history: widely called both the last of the old masters and the first of the moderns.
An old painter covered the walls of his own house with horrors no one had asked to see. There was a giant devouring a human body, witches huddled in the dark, drowning figures, a dog vanishing into a void. He painted them straight onto the plaster, for no patron and no sale, and never explained them. We call them the Black Paintings. By then Francisco Goya was deaf, ill, and done with flattering kings. He had already painted the firing squad, the screaming victims, the executions of war stripped of all glory. The court painter who began with gauzy aristocrats had looked into the abyss, and he painted what he saw there honestly enough that, for many later artists, modern art begins with him.