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Updated: June 14, 2025
Coming to the top of the staircase, up which he had been followed by a servant with a pallid countenance and a small pigtail clubbed at the back of his head, like one of Goya's sacristans or a tabellion in an old play, Swann passed by an office in which the lackeys, seated like notaries before their massive registers, rose solemnly to their feet and inscribed his name.
A lovely creature, better-looking when reclining than standing, as a glance at her full-length portrait in the New York Hispanic Museum proves. One of Goya's best portraits hangs in the Prado, the seated figure of his brother-in-law, the painter Bayeu.
Since Goya, you say, and then wonder whether it might not be wiser to add: Goya never had so complicated a psychology. A better craftsman than Goya, a more varied colourist, a more patient student of Velasquez, of life, though without Goya's invention, caprice, satanism, and fougue. Zuloaga was not born poor, but with genius; and genius always spells discontent.
It is thus proper to remark that this class easily glides into the deeply sad, the horrible, terrifying, nightmare-producing, "satanic literature;" Goya's paintings of robbers and thieves being garroted; Wiertz, a genius bizarre to the point of extravagance, who paints only suicides or the heads of guillotined criminals.
Then he gradually moved away, without ceasing to look at it, until, at last, he sat down on a bench, still facing the picture with his eyes fixed upon it. "Goya's Maja. The Maja Desnuda!" He spoke aloud, without realizing it, as if his words were the inevitable outburst of the thoughts that rushed into his mind and seemed to pass back and forth behind the lenses of his eyes.
We feel that the half-dead soldier being stripped, the condemned turning his head aside as far as the rope will permit, the man fallen crushed beneath his horse or vomiting out his blood, is the wretch who exclaims, "Por eso soy nacido!" They are, these etchings of Goya's, the representation of the sufferings, real and imaginative, of the real sufferers.
Soames passed into the corner where, side by side, hung his real Goya, and the copy of the fresco "La Vendimia." His acquisition of the real Goya rather beautifully illustrated the cobweb of vested interests and passions, which mesh the bright-winged fly of human life. The real Goya's noble owner's ancestor had come into possession of it during some Spanish war it was in a word loot.
We find it in what, of all things, are the apparently most different to the quiet and placid outline illustration of the Giottesque: in the terrible portfolio of Goya's etchings, called the Disasters of War. Like Dürer and Rembrandt, the great Spaniard is at once extremely realistic and extremely imaginative.
You are as fair as Goya's little Maja. You are the Maja Desnuda." Holding his breath like a swimmer, he delved into the depths of the closets, reaching out his hands greedily, yet eager to get out of there, to return, as soon as he could, to the surface, to the pure air. He came upon card-board boxes, bundles of belts and old lace, without finding what he was seeking.
Modern art, particularly American art, owes much to Velasquez and something to Goya, and modern painters have been prompt to acknowledge their indebtedness. But there has been a prevailing impression that with Goya's rich and unique achievement Spanish art stopped in its own country so completely as to be incapable of revival.
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