Spanish Rococo Era/Romantic Painter and Printmaker, 1746-1828 Goya is considered the 18th Century's foremost painter and etcher of Spanish culture, known for his realistic scenes of battles, bullfights and human corruption. Goya lived during a time of upheaval in Spain that included war with France, the Inquisition, the rule of Napoleon's brother, Joseph, as the King of Spain and, finally, the reign of the Spanish King Ferdinand VII. Experts proclaim these events -- and Goya's deafness as a result of an illness in 1793 -- as central to understanding Goya's work, which frequently depicts human misery in a satiric and sometimes nightmarish fashion. From the 1770s he was a royal court painter for Charles III and Charles IV, and when Bonaparte took the throne in 1809, Goya swore fealty to the new king. When the crown was restored to Spain's Ferdinand VII (1814), Goya, in spite of his earlier allegiance to the French king, was reinstated as royal painter. After 1824 he lived in self-imposed exile in Bordeaux until his death, reportedly because of political differences with Ferdinand. Over his long career he created hundreds of paintings, etchings, and lithographs, among them Maya Clothed and Maya Nude (1798-1800); Caprichos (1799-82); The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808 (1814); Disasters of War (1810-20); and The Black Paintings (1820-23).   Related Paintings of Francisco Jose de Goya :. | Charles IV and His Family | St.Francis Borgia Exorsizing | Time of the Old Women | Portrait of Mariano Goya, the Artist's Grandson | The Marquesa de Pontejos |
Related Artists:
Vincenzo Foppa
1427-1516 Italian Vincenzo Foppa Locations Italian painter. Giving new life to the art of the Lombard school, he exercised a great influence upon northern Italian art until the advent of Leonardo da Vinci. He settled (c.1456) in Pavia. There and in Milan he executed many important frescoes, most of which have been destroyed. He painted religious subjects exclusively, ranging from powerful renditions of the Crucifixion (Bergamo) to poignant depictions of the Madonna (Milan; Johnson Coll., Philadelphia; Davis Coll., Newport, R.I.; National Gall. of Art, Washington, D.C.). His large altarpiece of the Madonna and Child with Saints (Brera, Milan) is a notable example of his technical skill and variety of characterization.
Richard Dadd
1817-1886 was an English painter of the Victorian era, noted for his depictions of fairies and other supernatural subjects, Orientalist scenes, and enigmatic genre scenes, rendered with obsessively minuscule detail. Most of the works for which he is best known were created while he was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital. Dadd was born at Chatham, Medway in Kent, England, the son of a chemist. His aptitude for drawing was evident at an early age, leading to his admission to the Royal Academy of Arts at the age of 20. With William Powell Frith, Augustus Egg, Henry O'Neil and others, he founded The Clique, of which he was generally considered the leading talent. In July 1842, Sir Thomas Phillips, the former mayor of Newport, chose Dadd to accompany him as his draftsman on an expedition through Europe to Greece, Turkey, Palestine and finally Egypt. In November of that year they spent a gruelling two weeks in Palestine, passing from Jerusalem to Jordan and returning across the Engaddi wilderness. Toward the end of December, while travelling up the Nile by boat, Dadd underwent a dramatic personality change, becoming delusional and increasingly violent, and believing himself to be under the influence of the Egyptian god Osiris. His condition was initially thought to be sunstroke. On his return in the spring of 1843, he was diagnosed to be of unsound mind and was taken by his family to recuperate in the countryside village of Cobham, Kent. In August of that year, having become convinced that his father was the Devil in disguise, Dadd killed him with a knife and fled for France. En route to Paris Dadd attempted to kill another tourist with a razor, but was overpowered and was arrested by the police. Dadd confessed to the killing of his father and was returned to England, where he was committed to the criminal department of Bethlem psychiatric hospital (also known as Bedlam). Here and subsequently at the newly created Broadmoor, Dadd was cared for (and encouraged to continue painting) by the likes of Drs William Wood and Sir W. Charles Hood, in an enlightened manner. Which condition he suffered from is unclear, but it is usually understood to be a form of paranoid schizophrenia.He appears to have been genetically predisposed to mental illness; two of his siblings were similarly afflicted, while a third had "a private attendant" for unknown reasons.In the hospital he was allowed to continue to paint and it was here that many of his masterpieces were created, including his most celebrated painting, The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke, which he worked on between 1855 and 1864. Also dating from the 1850s are the thirty-three watercolour drawings titled Sketches to Illustrate the Passions, which include Grief or Sorrow, Love, and Jealousy, as well as Agony-Raving Madness and Murder. Like most of his works these are executed on a small scale and feature protagonists whose eyes are fixed in a peculiar, unfocused stare.
Edward John Eyre
1815-1901,British colonial administrator. In Australia (1833?C45) he was a magistrate, explorer, and writer on Australian geography, and had a reputation for sympathy for the aborigines. After terms as lieutenant governor of New Zealand (1846?C53) and governor of St. Vincent (1854?C60), he became (1864) governor of Jamaica. He was recalled in 1866 after suppressing a black uprising the year before in which more than four hundred Jamaicans were executed. Eyre was accused of brutality and illegal acts, especially in the execution of George Gordon, a black member of the Jamaican legislature who had contravened the martial law imposed during the emergency. He was recalled in 1866. Several attempts, promoted by John Stuart Mill, Goldwin Smith, and Herbert Spencer, to try him for murder were forestalled by a committee of admirers, which included John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Kingsley. An English grand jury declined to indict him, and a royal commission exonerated him, while criticizing his ??unnecessary rigour.?? The episode contributed to the fall of the government of Lord John Russell in 1866.