Art: Goya

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Loan exhibitions attract attention not only because they show the work of great artists but because they give the public a chance to view intimately the trappings of private wealth. Both these attractions were powerfully present last week in Manhattan when Knoedler Galleries opened what many critics considered the peak of the season's shows—a loan exhibit of Goya paintings. The pictures came from the discreet walls of Andrew William Mellon, Harrison Williams, Oscar B. Cintas (American Car & Foundry), Eugene G. Grace, Edward S. Harkness, J. Watson Webb. Mr. & Mrs. Charles Shipman Payson (Joan Whitney) sent their Don Vincente Osorio, Count of Trastamara as a Child from their huge living room in Manhasset. Jules Bache lent his often exhibited Don Manuel Osorio, an engaging infant half-surrounded by three cats, a bird cage, a tame magpie. Chicago's Art Institute was represented by six small canvases showing a monk accurately and amusingly shooting and capturing a bandit. All the other pictures were portraits: the aloof La Tirana, an actress whom legend has included among Goya's mistresses; Mr. Mellon's gravely beautiful Senora Sabasa Garcia; and the duchesses, generals, noble children with toys or animals whom a court painter must paint but which Goya immortalized.

The Spain upon which Francisco José Goya y Lucientes first opened his feral eyes was carelessly crumbling in vice and cruelty. Its population had dropped in 300 years from 12,000,000 to approximately half. The Inquisition had burned 30,000, imprisoned ten times as many. The court aped the worst of France. Duchesses dressed as servants and snooped through the streets or tore their mantillas fighting for title to a bullfighter. One nobleman explained his kindness to his servants by inquiring: "How can I be sure my real father is not among them?" There were riots every day in Madrid except during the Siesta. Across the Pyrenees in France, Voltaire and a Swiss-born neurotic called Jean Jacques Rousseau were mouthing strange phrases that were to mean a revolution, Napoleon, and the conquest of Spain. But in Madrid and throughout the land they reveled and stabbed and hoped only to see the morrow. Francisco Goya was born in 1746 of a remotely noble mother and a farmer father in Fuentodos. a tumbling village in Aragon. When he showed a facility for drawing, small Francisco was sent to nearby Saragossa, capital of Aragon, to study under one Luzan, a painstaking baroque copyist. There were rival churches and rival gangs and Goya, a husky, loud youth of 20, already a swordsman and perhaps a bullfighter, quickly joined the disputes. When three men were found dead in the streets one grey morning, he thought it advisable to go to Madrid. Here he drank and fought, observed the ritual of singing under windows, gained greater fame for this than for his occasional painting. On another morning he was found in the gutter with a knife sharp as an etcher's needle in his back, was smuggled to Rome by friendly bullfighters.

In Rome he managed to win an art competition prize, to climb the dome of St. Peter's and carve his initials higher than any previous vandal. He remained there two years or less; an alert guard caught him climbing a nunnery wall and he returned to Saragossa where he was promptly given a commission to decorate a church.