Francisco Goya – The Black Paintings, Los Caprichos and the Birth of Modern Art

Francisco Goya is the artist who, more than anyone else, carries the birth of modern art within his own body of work. He began his career as a decorator for the Spanish court, painting sunny scenes of everyday life for woven tapestries in royal palaces. He ended it with fourteen dark, almost unbearable paintings painted directly onto the walls of his own house outside Madrid—paintings that no one had commissioned and that no one saw until after his death. Between these two extremes lie half a century of war, illness, deafness, court intrigues, and an unwavering determination to see reality as it actually was.

For anyone interested in art history, Goya represents a turning point. Before him, painting was primarily a service to the Church, the Crown, and the nobility. After him, it became possible for an artist to use the brush as a personal testimony, an accusation, a private nightmare. This page explores Goya's life, his most important works, his technique as a painter and printmaker, his importance to later artists, and how his visual world functions as art in a Swedish home today. We also look at where you can actually see Goya's originals in Sweden.

Contents
↓ Who was Francisco Goya?
↓ From Fuendetodos to the court in Madrid
↓ Goya's most important works
↓ Technique, color, and artistic signature
↓ The printmaker Goya – Los Caprichos and the Disasters of War
↓ The Black Paintings and the Quinta del Sordo
↓ Goya's legacy and influence
↓ Goya as art in the home
↓ Goya in Sweden – the Nationalmuseum collection
↓ Timeline
↓ Related artists
↓ Frequently asked questions about Francisco Goya

Who was Francisco Goya?

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was born on March 30, 1746, in Fuendetodos, a small village in Aragon a few miles south of Zaragoza, and died on April 16, 1828, in Bordeaux, France. He was therefore 82 years old, an unusually advanced age for his time, and he worked almost until the very end. His output comprises around 700 paintings, nearly 900 drawings, and approximately 280 prints, making him one of the most prolific artists in European art history.

Goya was both a court painter and a social critic, a position that ought to have been impossible. He portrayed the Spanish royal family in gold-embroidered clothing while secretly etching images of the clergy's greed and the nobility's stupidity. He painted official commissions for the Church and made private drawings of torture victims. This duality is not a contradiction in his artistic career but its very essence: Goya understood early on that there is an official reality and a real reality, and he refused to choose between them.

Quick facts: Francisco de Goya was born on March 30, 1746, in Fuendetodos, Aragon, and died on April 16, 1828, in Bordeaux. He produced 63 tapestry cartoons for the Santa Bárbara Royal Tapestry Factory between 1775 and 1791. He was appointed court painter in 1789 under Charles IV and first court painter (primer pintor de cámara) in 1799. A severe illness in 1792–1793 left him almost completely deaf for the rest of his life. The print series Los Caprichos consists of 80 plates and was published in February 1799. The series The Disasters of War comprises 82 plates, created around 1810–1820. The fourteen Black Paintings were painted directly on the walls of the Quinta del Sordo around 1820–1823 and are now housed at the Museo del Prado in Madrid. The Nationalmuseum in Stockholm owns four paintings by Goya, one drawing, and a large number of prints and albums.

From Fuendetodos to the Court in Madrid

Goya's father was a gilder, a craft closely connected to ecclesiastical art, and the family belonged to the modest middle class in Aragon. At the age of fourteen, Francisco began an apprenticeship with the painter José Luzán y Martínez in Zaragoza, where he received traditional training: copying from graphic models until the hand learned the technique. He then made his way to Madrid and Francisco Bayeu, an established court painter whose sister Josefa Goya married in 1773. It was a marriage that was as much a career strategy as a love story, and it opened the doors to the court.

The Journey to Italy 1770–1771

Goya financed a study trip to Rome himself around 1770. There he encountered antiquity, Roman Baroque, and the emerging Neoclassicism. The following year, he entered a competition announced by the art academy in Parma and received an honorable mention. The journey gave him the international perspective that set him apart from many Spanish colleagues who never left the peninsula, and it provided him with a store of compositional formulas that he would build on for decades.

The Tapestry Cartoons 1775–1791

Between 1775 and 1791, Goya produced 63 large oil paintings that served as preparatory designs, known as cartoons, for the Santa Bárbara Royal Tapestry Factory. The weavers transferred the motifs onto tapestries that were hung in royal palaces such as El Pardo and El Escorial. The motifs were meant to be pleasing: picnics, dancing, playing children, market scenes. That is precisely what makes them interesting. Goya used the commission to study light, color harmonies, and everyday life with a freedom that a formal portrait would never have allowed.

The best known of these works is The Parasol (El Quitasol) from 1777, which now hangs in the Museo del Prado. A young woman in a silk dress sits on a stone wall with a small dog on her lap, while a majo, one of Madrid’s fashion-conscious working-class young men, stands behind her and holds a green silk parasol over her head. The green light filtering through the parasol bathes her face in a cool, almost greenish tone against the warm yellow background. It is a study in light that was a century ahead of its time and points straight towards Impressionism.

Court Painter and the Illness of 1792

In 1786 Goya became a court painter, in 1789 he was appointed court painter to the newly enthroned Charles IV, and in 1799 he reached the top of the official hierarchy as first court painter. But between these appointments occurred the event that divides his life in two. In the winter of 1792–1793, during a journey to Andalusia, he was struck by a severe illness involving dizziness, tinnitus, temporary blindness and paralysis. He survived, but became almost completely deaf for the rest of his life. The diagnosis is disputed; lead poisoning from pigments, a viral infection and Susac syndrome have all been proposed.

Deafness shut him out of the conversation that was the currency of court life and cast him into an inner room. It was after 1793 that dark motifs began to appear in his work: The Madhouse, scenes of bandits and shipwrecks, and shortly afterwards the print series Los Caprichos. The connection between his isolation and his radicalisation as an artist is one of the most debated subjects in art history.

Goya’s most important works

Goya’s best-known works span six decades and four entirely different registers: the decorative, the official, the political and the private. Understanding him requires seeing how these registers speak to one another.

The Family of Charles IV (1800–1801)

The large group portrait of Charles IV and his family measures 280 × 336 centimetres and hangs in the Prado. Thirteen people stand lined up in an official court interior, dressed in silk, velvet and orders. Goya himself is glimpsed in the shadow on the left, in front of a large canvas, a direct homage to Velázquez’s Las Meninas. The painting has become notorious for its seemingly merciless characterisation: Queen Maria Luisa at the centre, the king blank-eyed, the entire company stiff and lacklustre despite the gold. Art historians today disagree over whether Goya really intended satire or simply painted what he saw with a realism his contemporaries were unaccustomed to.

The Third of May 1808 (1814)

This is probably Goya’s single most influential painting. It was completed in 1814 and depicts the execution of members of the Spanish resistance after the uprising against Napoleon’s occupying forces in Madrid on the night between May 2 and 3, 1808. A nameless man in a white shirt stands with outstretched arms before an anonymous row of gun barrels, illuminated by a square lantern on the ground. The soldiers have no faces; they are a machine. The ground in front is already covered with bodies.

The painting breaks with the entire heroic battlefield tradition. There is no noble general, no banner, no victor. Manet quoted the composition almost directly in his paintings of the execution of Emperor Maximilian in the 1860s, and Picasso built on it in Guernica in 1937. You can read more about this line of influence on our pages about Édouard Manet and Pablo Picasso.

The Clothed Maja and The Nude Maja (circa 1797–1805)

The two nearly identical reclining portraits of women, one clothed and the other nude, originally belonged to the collection of Prime Minister Manuel Godoy. The Nude Maja is considered one of the first known Western paintings of a nude woman without a mythological pretext; she is not Venus, she is a person, and she looks directly into the viewer’s eyes. The works brought Goya before the Inquisition in 1815, and he refused to reveal who had commissioned them. Both now hang at the Prado.

Self-Portrait with Doctor Arrieta (1820)

In 1819, at the age of 73, Goya suffered another life-threatening illness. The following year, he painted himself half-conscious in bed, with the doctor Eugenio García Arrieta behind him, holding a glass of medicine to his lips. Three shadowy figures can be glimpsed in the background. The inscription at the bottom thanks the doctor for saving his life. The painting is held at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in the United States and is considered one of the most moving self-portraits in Western art, an ex voto painting in which the artist himself is the one who has been healed.

"The imagination, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with reason, it is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders." – Francisco Goya, comment on plate 43 of Los Caprichos, 1799

Technique, Color, and Artistic Signature

Goya’s painting evolves from a smooth, luminous Rococo palette into increasingly rougher, more compressed painting in which the brush leaves visible traces. Anyone who views his work chronologically at the Prado sees a hand that gradually stops concealing itself.

The Palette and the Black Ground

From the 1790s onward, Goya increasingly worked against dark underlying tones. He lays the light as a thin veil over a deep brown-black ground, much as Caravaggio had done two centuries earlier, but without Caravaggio's sharp contour. Goya's light is hazy and uncertain. In The Third of May 1808, all the light comes from a single lantern on the ground, a technical solution that is also a dramatic one: the man who is about to die is the only one who can be seen.

Brushwork and the Unfinished

In his late works, Goya worked with a palette knife, a cloth, and even his thumb. The paint is applied in thick, irregular slabs, with the underlying surface sometimes left visible. This was long perceived as carelessness and caused his late work to be undervalued throughout much of the 19th century. Today, the same brushwork is seen as the direct precursor to Expressionism and to the broader idea that a painting's surface can carry emotion in itself.

Portraiture as Psychology

As a portrait painter, Goya had a unique ability to make the clothing sumptuous while leaving the gaze unvarnished. His portraits of the Duchess of Alba, the writer Leandro Fernández de Moratín, and the Countess of Chinchón show people caught in the middle of a thought rather than posing. Technically, he achieves this by painting the face with considerably more and thinner layers than the rest of the canvas, giving the skin an inner radiance while treating the fabric quickly and summarily.

The Printmaker Goya – Los Caprichos and The Horrors of War

Goya is one of the greatest printmakers in art history, comparable to Rembrandt van Rijn. He worked mainly in etching combined with aquatint, a technique that uses resin and acid to create continuous gray tones rather than just lines. The result is a visual world of mist, shadow, and sudden fields of light.

Los Caprichos (1799)

Los Caprichos consists of 80 etchings and aquatints, produced in 1797–1798 and published as an album in February 1799. The series is a systematic satire of Spanish society at the end of the 18th century: arranged marriages, prostitution, the clergy's greed, the nobility's inbreeding, and popular belief in witches and spirits. The most famous plate is number 43, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos, in which a sleeping man at a desk is surrounded by owls and bats.

The publication was a commercial catastrophe and a political risk. Just fourteen days after the album was put up for sale, Goya withdrew the remaining copies, fearing the Inquisition after his patron Manuel Godoy had lost power. In 1803, he handed over the copper plates and unsold albums to the Crown in exchange for a lifetime pension for his son Javier.

The Horrors of War (approximately 1810–1820)

Los Desastres de la Guerra comprises 82 plates and depicts the Spanish War of Independence against Napoleon, the famine in Madrid in 1811–1812, and the subsequent political reaction. The plates show mutilations, executions, rapes, and mass graves without any beautifying framework. The captions are short and bitter: "One cannot look", "I saw this", "Why?". The series was never published during Goya's lifetime; it was first printed in 1863, 35 years after his death, by the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. The Nationalmuseum in Stockholm has prints from this series in its collections.

The Black Paintings and Quinta del Sordo

In 1819, Goya bought a two-story country house outside Madrid by the Manzanares River. The house was already called Quinta del Sordo, the Deaf Man's Country House, after a previous owner, but the name suited its new owner just as well. Here, probably between 1820 and 1823, Goya, then over seventy years old, painted fourteen images directly onto the walls' plaster, in two rooms, without a commissioner and with no intention of displaying them.

What do they depict?

The motifs lack a coherent program. Saturn Devouring His Son shows the god in the act of eating a body, with bulging eyes. The Dog shows a small animal's head barely emerging from an ocher-colored mass, with the rest of the image empty. The Pilgrimage to San Isidro shows a droning crowd with distorted faces making its way through a dark landscape. Two Old Men Eating Soup, witches' sabbaths, a woman by a grating. The titles are not Goya's own but were added later.

From wall to canvas

The paintings were first discovered after Goya's death in 1828 and remained on the walls for decades. In the 1870s, the owner at the time, Baron Frédéric Émile d'Erlanger, had them transferred from plaster to canvas, a technically brutal intervention that damaged the surfaces and made the colors darker than they originally were. The works were displayed at the World's Fair in Paris in 1878 without finding buyers and were donated to the Spanish state in 1881. Since then, all fourteen have been housed at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, where they have their own continuous gallery section.

In 2025, the Prado began an extensive rehang of its eighteenth-century and Goya galleries, a process in which the so-called Goya Galleries 32 to 38 on the first floor constitute the final phase and will continue throughout 2026. The aim is to make the chronology and connections within the collection clearer to visitors.

Goya's legacy and influence

Goya's influence has been exceptionally enduring. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, he became a key figure for the French realists and for Manet, who saw in him a precursor to painting without rhetoric. Baudelaire wrote about him as early as 1857, highlighting precisely the fusion of the real and the fantastic. In the twentieth century, he became indispensable to Surrealism, which saw in Los Caprichos an early exploration of dreams and the unconscious.

Picasso's Guernica from 1937 is unthinkable without The Third of May 1808: the same format of collective suffering, the same refusal to make violence beautiful. In the postwar period, Goya became a reference point for artists working with war and political violence, from Robert Motherwell to the Chapman brothers, who in 1999 bought an original edition of The Disasters of War and reworked it.

In exhibition terms, interest has not waned. From October 10, 2021, to January 23, 2022, Fondation Beyeler in Basel presented one of the largest Goya exhibitions ever held outside Spain, with 181 works: 77 paintings, 53 prints, and 51 drawings, developed in collaboration with the Prado. His works are rare on the auction market; in January 2023, Christie's in New York recorded record prices for two Goya portraits as part of total sales of $62.7 million for the house's Old Masters auctions, and three rediscovered Goya sketches that had been missing for 130 years fetched around $8 million.

Goya as art in the home

Goya is not an obvious artist to live with, and that is precisely why he works so well. Where a poster of a famous artist is often chosen because it is beautiful, a Goya is chosen because it is charged. This places demands on its location.

Choose the right side of Goya

Goya's output encompasses two extremes, and they require different rooms. The light genre scenes from the tapestry cartoons, with their yellow, light-green, and pink harmonies, suit living areas and dining spaces; they have the same sunny lightness as the visual world of Rococo. The prints from Los Caprichos, with their black-and-white gray scales, belong in the study, hallway, or staircase, where people pass by and pause. A cohesive grouping of black-and-white posters of graphic prints creates a unified, almost museum-like effect.

Framing and distance

Goya's prints are small in the original, often around 20 × 15 centimeters, and can therefore accommodate a generous mat. A four- to six-centimeter-wide white or off-white mount gives the sheet room to breathe and signals that it is a graphic work rather than a decoration. The opposite applies to paintings: dark canvases benefit from a narrow, dark frame in black-stained or dark-brown frame that lets the image continue out into the room. Read our guide to framing art for dimensions and material choices.

Tips: Never hang a dark Goya in direct backlight opposite a window. The black areas absorb light, and the image becomes a mirror. Instead, place the artwork on a wall perpendicular to the light source, or on the wall where the window is located, and supplement it with directional picture lighting at around 2700 kelvin. The warm light renders Goya's ochre-yellow and reddish-brown tones far more faithfully than cool-white lighting.

Combine Goya with other art

Goya sits comfortably alongside other classical art from the Baroque and Romantic periods, but the most interesting effect emerges through contrast. A print from Los Caprichos beside a purely geometric motif creates a tension between reason and imagination that is precisely what Goya himself wrote about. In a cohesive arrangement, Goya should be the anchor: largest in format, carrying the most visual weight, placed at eye level, with the other motifs grouped around it. Our guide to gallery walls explains the principles, and the living room guide includes specific measurement suggestions. If you are unsure which motif suits your room, read about how to choose the right art.

Goya in Sweden – The Nationalmuseum Collection

Sweden has a surprisingly strong Goya collection. Nationalmuseum in Stockholm owns four paintings, one drawing, as well as a large number of individual prints and bound albums. The collection thus encompasses Goya's various roles: portrait painter, allegorist, draughtsman, and printmaker.

Two of the paintings are large allegories commissioned by Prime Minister Manuel Godoy at the beginning of the 19th century: Poetry and Truth, Time and History. The latter, an oil painting usually dated to around 1812–1814, has belonged to the Nationalmuseum since 1961 and is one of the museum's most significant foreign acquisitions of the postwar period. The motif shows winged Time lifting up the naked Truth, while History takes notes. It is an Enlightenment program in pictorial form, painted in the midst of a war that made the optimism of the Enlightenment difficult to sustain.

Interest in the collection remains strong. On March 6, 2026, the lecture "Goya in the Nationalmuseum Collections" was held with the Spanish art historian José Ignacio Calvo Ruata, who reviewed the museum's Goya holdings work by work. Those wishing to see the originals can usually access the prints through the museum's study visits, while the paintings are displayed in the permanent collections. Read more in Wikipedia's article on Goya or in the Museo del Prado's collection database.

Timeline

1746 – Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes is born on 30 March in Fuendetodos, Aragon, the son of a gilder.

1760 – Begins an apprenticeship at the age of fourteen with the painter José Luzán y Martínez in Zaragoza.

1770–1771 – Study trip to Rome at his own expense; receives an honourable mention in the Parma Academy of Fine Arts competition in 1771.

1773 – Marries Josefa Bayeu, sister of the court painter Francisco Bayeu, opening the way to the court.

1775–1791 – Produces 63 tapestry cartoons for the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Bárbara, including The Parasol in 1777.

1789 – Is appointed court painter to the newly crowned Charles IV.

1792–1793 – Suffers a serious illness in Andalusia and becomes almost completely deaf for the rest of his life.

1799 – Publishes Los Caprichos in February and is appointed First Court Painter that same year. The album is withdrawn after fourteen days.

1800–1801 – Paints the large group portrait The Family of Charles IV, 280 × 336 centimetres.

1808–1814 – The Spanish War of Independence. Goya works on The Disasters of War and paints The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808 in 1814.

1819 – Buys Quinta del Sordo outside Madrid; suffers a second life-threatening illness.

1820 – Paints Self-Portrait with Dr. Arrieta, now at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

1820–1823 – Paints the fourteen Black Paintings directly on the walls of Quinta del Sordo.

1824 – Leaves Spain for political reasons and settles in Bordeaux.

1828 – Dies on 16 April in Bordeaux, aged 82.

1863 – The Disasters of War is published for the first time, 35 years after Goya's death.

1881 – The Black Paintings are donated to the Spanish state and taken to the Museo del Prado.

Related artists and movements

Goya stands with one foot in the Baroque and the other in Romanticism, while in practice he invents much of what would later be called modern painting. His technical kinship with Rembrandt applies above all to printmaking, while his handling of light can be traced back to Caravaggio. Looking ahead, the lines lead to Manet, Expressionism, and Picasso.

If you want to place Goya in a broader context, you can find our full overview of the periods on the page about art history. A complete list of our fact pages about artists and movements can be found in the Knowledge Bank.

Frequently asked questions about Francisco Goya

If you want to bring home something from the Spanish master’s imagery, you’ll find our full selection of art history motifs among posters by famous artists. All motifs are printed on FSC-certified paper in Sweden and can be complemented with an oak, black or white frame directly when ordering.