Goya | Self-portrait with Easel
Self-portrait in the Studio
also known as
"Self-Portrait with Easel"
Oil on canvas
42 cm x 28 cm
16 1/2 inches x 11 inches
Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes, Madrid
Xavier de Salas dates this painting 1790-1795 in his book Goya, Mayflower Books, 1978.
Sarah Symmons (in her book, Goya, Phaidon Press, 1998) dates this painting to 1791-2.
"His intriguing Self-Portrait in the Studio has been dated as early as 1775-80 and as late as 1795. The loose style and distinctive colouring aral of Goya's painting from the 1790s, but the vigorous pose makes it unlikely to have been painted after the artist's life-threatening and lengthy illness of 1792-1793."
From Sarah Symmons book Goya, Phaidon Press, 1998, page 128)
"...he is not likely to have regularly worked in that embroidered, red-braided bullfighter's jacket, which together with Goya's direct and level gaze, makes its statement clearly: I can't be fooled, I'm tough, I am a man of the people, I know what I see."
From Robert Hughes book Goya, Knopf Books, 2003, page 81)
Related
Goya Self-Portrait with Spectacles 1797
Goya Self Portrait on Linen 1795
AMAZON
Goya The Terrible Sublime - Graphic Novel - (Spanish Edition) - Amazon
"From this headlong seizure of life we should not expect a calm and refined art, nor a reflective one. Yet Goya was more than a Nietzschean egoist riding roughshod over the world to assert his supermanhood. He was receptive to all shades of feeling, and it was his extreme sensitivity as well as his muscular temerity that actuated his assaults on the outrageous society of Spain." From Thomas Craven's essay on Goya from MEN OF ART (1931).
"...Loneliness has its limits, for Goya was not a prophet but a painter. If he had not been a painter his attitude to life would have found expression only in preaching or suicide." From Andre Malroux's essay in SATURN: AN ESSAY ON GOYA (1957).
"Goya is always a great artist, often a frightening one...light and shade play upon atrocious horrors." From Charles Baudelaire's essay on Goya from CURIOSITES ESTRANGERS (1842).
"[An] extraordinary mingling of hatred and compassion, despair and sardonic humour, realism and fantasy." From the foreword by Aldous Huxley to THE COMPLETE ETCHINGS OF GOYA (1962).
"His analysis in paint, chalk and ink of mass disaster and human frailty pointed to someone obsessed with the chaos of existence..." From the book on Goya by Sarah Symmons (1998).
"I cannot forgive you for admiring Goya...I find nothing in the least pleasing about his paintings or his etchings..." From a letter to (spanish) Duchess Colonna from the French writer Prosper Merimee (1869).
GOYA : Los Caprichos - Dover Edition - Amazon
