Francisco Goya is art’s pre-eminent painter of human darkness. His Black Paintings are full of witches’ sabbaths, beheadings, cudgellings and the celebrated and distressing image of Saturn Devouring His Son; the Disasters of War etchings show the severed limbs, mutilation and torture that came with the Napoleonic wars (“Yo lo vi,” he wrote in the margin of one print, “I saw it”). Los Caprichos prints illustrate the base and transactional nature of existence, with a dollop of superstition added, too. He painted madhouses and brigands, rapes, violence and, in The Third of May 1808, an execution scene so bleak that any hope of redemption or an afterlife has been ruthlessly excised. But long before he released such themes, he worked as an interior decorator.
When Goya moved to Madrid in 1775, his misanthropy had yet to manifest. Indeed, he had a reputation around Zaragoza as a painter of conventional religious works. He arrived in the capital with his teacher and brother-in-law Francisco Bayeu for entirely professional reasons. He wanted to be taught by the king’s painter Anton Raphael Mengs, a German artist who took classical purity to the point of sterility, and it was Mengs who commissioned him to paint designs (cartoons) for tapestries for the royal palaces.
Despite the new proximity to court circles, this was far from prestigious work. This was not in the same category as painting a full-length portrait of the king, Charles III; the cartoons were not seen as independent paintings at all but intended as nothing more than templates for the weavers to follow: once used, they were usually discarded. They were limiting, too: an artist could not use any subtleties of paint – shading, colour transitions, detailing, surface effects – that could not be reproduced in thread. These were simplified images made with relatively broad handling.
Between 1775 and 1792, Goya painted 63 cartoon designs and most simply vanished once the tapestries had been made. It wasn’t until 1868, 40 years after his death, that many of them were found rolled up in the basement of the Royal Palace. They contained a strange mixture of themes: almost all peopled by the non-noble class, usually in the native costume of majas and majos. There are scenes of picnicking and street vendors, games such as blind man’s buff, the Madrid fair, open-air dancing, contented washerwomen and grape harvesters – the sort of subjects found in sainetes, popular theatrical sketches showing recognisable “types”. But there are darker themes too: an injured mason who has fallen from some scaffolding, a vicious fight outside an inn, a poor widow and her children at a water fountain. These last are sometimes seen as a nod towards Charles III’s sympathy for the working poor.
However, even in some of the most frivolous rococo images there are disquieting undertones. A straw mannequin tossed in the air by four girls is an oblique comment on the powerlessness of men in the face of women; two cats, hackles raised, face off on some broken masonry; children wrestle with real intent by a broken bottle; and a young woman looks less than comfortable surrounded by singing and drinking men. In them the world of The Marriage of Figaro has taken a darker turn. The designs, as Goya was keen to stress, were “of my invention”.
Somewhere in a middle mood sits The Snowstorm. It was one of a series of tapestry designs (of which 13 survive) showing the four seasons, painted by Goya in 1786 for the Pardo Palace, home of the prince and princess of Asturias, the future Charles IV and his queen Maria Luisa of Parma. It hung between two innocuous scenes, Shepherd Playing a Dulzaina and Hunter by a Spring,but it shares none of their bucolic mood.
It is an enigmatic gathering: five men and a dog battle a snowbound landscape and a whipping, bitter wind that blows strongly enough to bend the trees. They may be part of the same group, or the man with the rifle and his companion with a mule carrying a dead pig – an animal associated with winter because its slaughter marked the beginning of the season – may be crossing the path of the blanket-wrapped trio. There seems to be a narrative to this encounter but none is made clear; there is a hint of the three wise men about the central figures (the man in blue breeches has darker features than his companions), and a distinction between the colourfulness of the trio and the subfusc of the two working men (are they servants bringing home the bacon?). The left-hand figure of the trio has Goya’s features; only he knows what is really going on.
At the point he painted what is surely the chilliest painting in art, Goya’s own fortunes were warming. He had been made deputy director of painting at the Royal Academy, and the year he painted The Snowstorm he was appointed painter to the king. He celebrated his new status with a spot of conspicuous consumption: “I spend a lot, because I decided to and because I like it.” He bought the latest in open carriages, “so light that not another like it is to be found”, as he wrote to his childhood friend Martín Zapater, “even here people stop to look”. He didn’t keep it long, however, crashing twice, once when the seller demonstrating its capabilities turned it over and then when Goya himself flipped it “and almost killed a man who was walking in the street”.
Goya seems to have had a good relationship with The Snowstorm’s client, Charles IV. They shared a love of the chase, with the king announcing after a shoot that “this rotten dauber is even more passionate about hunting than I am”. With their mutual delight in hounds, perhaps the painter knew that the dog in the picture, so faithfully depicted, would please his patron. Goya believed that his being a good shot was more important to his aristocratic clientele than being a good painter. On one foray he killed 18 pieces of game with 19 shots.
Goya’s rising stock exacerbated his boredom with producing tapestry cartoons and he needed to be strong-armed into finishing the commissions. His respite, however, was short-lived; in 1793, an episode of “colic” left his hearing impaired and despite the use of an “electrical machine” at the Royal Laboratory of Chemistry, by 1794 he was totally deaf. As is the way, the loss of one sense heightened others and Goya began to examine his fellows – their instincts and motivations as well as their looks – ever more closely. Freed from noise and marooned in his own isolation and depression, he found in them plenty to paint but very little to admire.
[Further reading: Goodbye Martin Parr]
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This article appears in the 12 Dec 2025 issue of the New Statesman, All Alone: Christmas Special 2025
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