This is a study of Francisco Goya (1746-1828), the Spanish painter and graphic artist whose work ranges from elegant and opulent royal portraits to dark depictions of horror and evil.

Goya (Art & Ideas)

Arts & Photography

SYMMONS, SARAH

History & Criticism

Phaidon Press

GOYA ART & IDEES

PHAIDON FRANCE

Goya

Reference

Catalogs & Directories

Oresko Books Ltd

1977, oversize trade paperback edition, Oresko Books, London, U.K. 104 pages. Printed on glossy stock, 100 total illustrations, 9 in full color. Written by an academic scholar. Extremely well done, with informed, elongated captions to the paintings / illustrations. Includes a long narrative about the Spanish artist. A most impressive volume, nicely printed.

Oresko Books Ltd., London

Daumier

Individual Artists

Olympic Marketing Corp

Oresko Books

Goya was born in 1746. By the time he was 47 he was the highest paid and most famous artist in Spain, had gone profoundly deaf and six of his seven children had died. He worked for three Spanish monarchs, the duke of Wellington, the Spanish aristocracy and intelligentsia, and for Napoleon's brother. One Spanish prince called him 'the painting monkey', contemporary critics called him 'the philosopher painter'. His friends called him Paco, and 'Our Dear Goya'. A local newspaper referred to one of his portraits as bringing honour to the whole Spanish nation. He learned to lip-read and speak in sign language; he painted with his fingers, a palette knife and with the pointed end of his paintbrush; he invented engraving techniques which are still in use by modern artists; his 'Nude Maja', 'The Third of May' and 'Saturn devouring his son' are ranked among the most powerful and mysterious paintings in the history of European art.  From an early age Goya was anxious to preserve a record of his life, but few of his writings have survived and his most personal records appear in his letters. He corresponded regularly with the aristocracy and the monarchy, as well as with friends. Goya's surviving letters reveal a highly emotional man, prepared to state his feelings as passionately to the authorities of a Cathedral as to a close friend. His letters make few concessions and are literary works in their own right. Uniquely individual, they signal a new attitude on the part of a fine artist towards his profession, his social position and his sources of inspiration. These writings look forward to the great artistic testaments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Delacroix's Diary, the letters of Van Gogh and Dali's Diary of a Genius. From this new collection of letters, many translated into English for the first time, Goya emerges as witty, passionate and unexpectedly vulnerable.

Goya: A Life in Letters

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Pimlico

Ranked alongside Ingres by Baudelaire as the finest draughtsman in Paris and matched as a political caricaturist in the nineteenth century only by Goya, Honoré Daumier worked for opposition newspapers throughout the Second Empire, one of the most corrupt and flamboyant periods in French history. He won fame, notoriety, and so a prison sentence, for his prodigious output of caricatures of prominent politicians and his relentless lampooning of the hypocrisy and pretentions of contemporary Parisian moeurs. Sarah Symmons both examines Daumier’s role as a professional newspaper artist and explores his more personal body of work, which remained largely unknown during his lifetime. Investigating his series of watercolours and oils of the ordinary citizens of Paris, of the railway travellers, mounte-banks and washerwomen who also people his caricatures, she finds a tragic monumentality far removed from the journalistic cynicism of much of his newspaper work. This quality they share with his more ambitious studies of the dispossessed, of fugitives and emigrants, and of the heroically absurd wanderings of Don Quixote. Often choosing to paint the simple everyday life he saw around him, Daumier was a model example of le peintre de la vie moderne, while his use of pictorial understatement and his painstaking search for absolute simplicity gave many of his pictures an experimental, ‘unfinished’ quality, which discouraged official recognition, but led to such artists as Picasso, Steinlen and Paul Klee to study his work closely during their formative years. Sarah Symmons has produced a comprehensive analysis of Daumier’s career as a painter, sculptor and caricaturist, documenting his striving for the stark and truthful simplicity which gives his finest work an air of universality and permanence, while reflecting the anxieties and insecurity of his own life and times.

Chaucer Pr

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