William Wilson (1720–1796)

Transcription

In this very small self-portrait by Goya, painted three or four years after the illness which left him completely deaf, we are looking at a man who has seen death, who has been very very close to death, who has lost his hearing, who will never hear again for the rest of his life. He has come back through a slow convalescence and is really now back to pretty good health but is beginning to remake his career. And he had been of course an extraordinarily important figure at the court. He had spent many years of his life painting huge preparatory cartoons for tapestries and suddenly at a blow he was reduced to a very weak and ill individual. But the strength of his character, which I think shines through him in this portrait, and together with a deep sense of tragedy, a tragedy which he managed to overcome by his willpower and by his desire to continue his work as an artist. It is a very very powerful portrait in spite of its small size. It’s not exactly a miniature, which would be maybe one quarter of that size, but it is a very very long way from any of his face to face self-portraits on canvas which are normally larger size. If we look at this work in detail, we see that it is painted almost like a watercolor shows the artist looking rather like Beethoven with a romantic dishevelment of his hair and this incredibly intense gaze which shows to my thinking a symbolic moment where he knows that he is back on track his painting. He has a canvas on an easel in front of him, we can’t see his brushes, we can’t see what he is painting but his arm and hand at the end of it have moved in front of the surface of the canvas. What we see is the back of the canvas and it is on the back of the canvas that he has signed his name in very small letters down in the lower right hand corner: “Goya”. Simply. He painted this portrait during a year or a year in a half where we knew very little about his movements. He went to Andalucía. There is no record of him having been commissioned to leave the court, but everyone knew that he was ill and he stayed away recovering. And During this year he visited the Duchess of Alba on her estates at Sanlúcar de Barrameda and it was no doubt that is what there that he had painted this portrait and gave it to her. So at this time Goya is in fact preparing his drawings and the preparatory drawings directly for engravings, he is preparing his great project for the prints of "Los Caprichos". This portrait in a way symbolizes his move from the earlier 18th Century, a period when things may not have been perfect but there was a sense of innocence and joy. But the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and the things that were to come are all foreshadowed in this small work. It is interesting but some years after was the publication of the Caprichos in 1799, so about three years after Goya painted this particular portrait. Now 1811 is of course a year after Goya began to engrave the "Desastres de la guerra" and I think what is going to happen is also symbolized in this portrait. This incredibly serious artist sitting at his easel and in the background in his studio we can imagine all his etching materials, his drawing materials spread out around him and he is going to throw himself into making another great series of prints the "Fatales consecuencias de la sangrienta guerra en España con Bonaparte", all this is seems to me is summed up in this very small and very moving work.