Word: goya
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Love & War. The new Goya glares with brutal clarity, like a wounded fighting bull, from the self-portrait made two years after his illness (see cut). It was at about this time that the Duchess of Alba took him on. As willful as she was lovely, the Duchess surrounded herself with the freaks, dwarfs and buffoons whom Goya loved to draw. They made a dramatic setting for her fragile, doll-like beauty. Goya drew and painted her often, sometimes with admiration and sometimes in anger at her wild flirting. Once he showed her carried away by witches and looking...
Like most Spanish intellectuals since his day, Goya was a liberal at war with himself. When Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, Goya at first welcomed what he hoped would be a clean broom. But his patriotic heart went out to the defenders, and he finally engraved on his dagger the words: "Death to the French." Still, he lived on the fringes of the invader's court, painted French generals as well as Spanish. He also portrayed the triumphant Wellington, and finally, though with obvious distaste, the returned King Ferdinand VII. Vacillating and bad-tempered though Goya was, no ruler...
Demons & Bulls. With age, Goya retired deeper and deeper into lonely fantasy. He adorned the walls of his house outside Madrid with huge ghosts, monsters and demons, and made a series of etchings, Stupidities, giving nightmare form to the superstitions and cruelties that obsessed him. At 78 he went into voluntary exile at Bordeaux, where a circle of liberal expatriates welcomed...
Henceforth the world was to see the Spain that Goya had abandoned through Goya's bitter...
Toward the end, Goya returned to an early passion, bullfighting, and drew his great series called The Bulls of Bordeaux...