Art: The Steep Path

Had Francisco Goya died of the infection that deafened him at 47, he would be remembered only as a Spanish court painter with a knack for candid likenesses. But the tortuous, stone-silent path he entered in middle age led steeply upward, and he clambered gloomily to greatness. The blackest and harshest of the old masters, Goya made bitterness a virtue and found pessimism a fountain of youth. A big traveling show of Goya drawings, on display this week in San Francisco, proves once again how great his final achievement was.

Troublesome Tourist. Goya's beginnings were humble; they did not make him so. Every self-respecting Spaniard considers himself in some sense noble, and Goya was born in one of the proudest Spanish regions: barren Aragon. His father, a gilder by trade, was too poor to provide much for his son's education, so Goya decamped for Madrid, twice tried and failed to get an art scholarship. In 1766, when he was 20, Goya turned up in Italy. According to legend, he was a troublesome tourist, cocky, stocky, amorous and quick to duel.

He must have supported himself by hack painting, was apparently unmoved by the marvelous remnants of the Renaissance.

Five years later, Goya returned to Spain. He married the sister of an influential painter named Bayeu, got a commission to design tapestries for the royal weavers. Everyday-life scenes were the assigned subjects which forced Goya to look sharply at the world around him. His tapestries could not be called brilliant, but they record the life of the day with considerable verve. Ordered to make engravings after the Velásquez portraits that hung in the palace galleries, he did a barely creditable job, but the genius of his predecessor was impressed upon him.

Striving for the same objectivity, the same near-magical illusionism that distinguished Velásquez, Goya took up portraiture himself.

The 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 a few.

His portraits of children were invariably sympathetic; he showed them looking bored, as no doubt they were.

Goya himself had five children, money in the bank and a gay life—"Everything I could wish for," as he wrote to a friend.

Then, in 1793, real fortune came to him, as often to genius, in the shape of disaster.

Some say it was syphilis, a theory which accords with Goya's rakehell reputation.