Goya: Truth and Fantasy

Goya once wrote that painting on a small scale allowed him to give free rein to his fantasy and invention. Intensely expressive and personal, his small paintings at times depict popular subjects - bullfights, open air pantomime and theatrical comedy and at other times reflect the darker side of the eighteenth century imagination, the uncertainty and violence of the era, or the private anxieties of the artist and his society.

This book surveys the small scale works painted by Goya throughout his career. It includes all the surviving sketches for his tapestry cartoons enchanting decorative works still in an eighteenth century idiom, yet also the first paintings in which Goya began to explore a genuinely Spanish vein of realism. Sketches for his major altarpieces, dating from the 1770s to 1820, provide evidence of his ability to work out large-scale compositions on a miniature scale.

The little cabinet pictures of 1793-4, painted during convalescence after a near fatal illness, illustrates scenes of fire and shipwreck, brigands, lunatics, bullfights and fairgrounds, and they contain the kernel of the artistic language that he was to develop throughout the rest of his career.

The book also discusses and reproduces Goya's tragicomic paintings of witchcraft, the more sombre scenes of violence and resistance, painted as Spain came under Napoleon's domination, his celebrated small portraits and the miniature lowlife scenes he painted while he was in exile in France at the end of his life.

This beautiful book accompanies a major exhibition of Goya's small scale paintings held at the Prado in Madrid in November 1993, the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994.