Francisco Goya was a Spanish painter, born in 1746 in the Aragonese village of Fuendetodos and dead in Bordeaux in 1828. He rose from a gilder's son to First Court Painter of Spain, lost his hearing in his forties, and turned to witches, war and madness. He is remembered above all for Saturn Devouring His Son, a god eating his own child, one of fourteen murals he painted on the walls of his own house.
For thirty years he painted the Spanish royal family and designed tapestries of picnics and flirtations. In his seventies he shut himself in a country house outside Madrid and painted this.
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The house stood outside Madrid and was called the Quinta del Sordo, the House of the Deaf Man. Goya bought it in 1819. Between 1820 and 1823 he painted fourteen murals straight onto its walls: a god devouring a child, two old men eating soup, a witches' gathering around a goat.
No one had ordered any of it. Goya gave none of it a title, and the names we use today were chosen later by art historians. He left Spain in 1824 and never saw the walls again.
The man who covered them had begun his career with sunshades and village dances. How a court painter ends up there is the whole story of his life, and it turns on a winter in Andalusia.
What You'll Discover
Who gave him no votes.
What struck him down in Andalusia.
Why he pulled his prints from sale.
What he drew and never printed.
Who was summoned over a nude.
What he painted on his own walls.