The Difficult Genius of Francisco Goya

On the Birthday of Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes

Every year, on this date, I find myself thinking of Francisco Goya—not just the painter, but the man: the court chronicler, the satirist, the wounded citizen, the exiled skeptic. Goya was born on March 30, 1746, in Fuendetodos, Spain, and if ever there were an artist who contained multitudes (with all due respect to Walt Whitman), it was him. He might have lived in the Age of Enlightenment, but he painted like someone who had seen the end of it.

I confess I have a complicated relationship with Goya. Some days I find him transcendent—audacious, unflinching, prophetic. Other days I feel like he’s dragging me into a cave with no light and no guarantee of a way out. But maybe that’s the mark of the real art: it resists satisfaction. Goya doesn’t flatter the viewer. He demands.

His career is a bildungsroman in oils and etchings—novelistic in its arc and depth. Goya began as a rococo court painter, producing elegant portraits that flatter with just enough wit to remain palatable to patrons. But even in those early works, you can sense something coiled beneath the surface, waiting. By the time we reach The Third of May 1808, the court has all but disappeared, and we are face to face with raw terror, moral clarity, and unrelenting violence. It is, without exaggeration, a painting that redefined the role of art in political conscience. It doesn’t moralize—it witnesses.

​And then, of course, there are Los Caprichos and The Disasters of War—works that read like visual essays, unsparing in their critique of superstition, brutality, and human folly. They hold up a mirror and break it at the same time. These are not paintings to be admired from a polite distance. They are confrontations.

And if that weren’t enough, Goya ends his career not in stately retrospection but in something closer to madness. The Black Paintings, created in isolation during his final years, are unlike anything else in European art. Saturn Devouring His Son is practically an act of exorcism. The quiet horror of Two Old Men Eating Soup is somehow more chilling than the mythological gore. These are not works of a man who has lost his mind—they are works of a man who has seen too much.

What I admire, perhaps more than anything, is that Goya never stopped evolving. He refused to calcify. He changed not because the market demanded it, but because history did—because life did. He painted the world as it was, not as he wished it to be. In that way, he was not only an artist of his time but of ours as well. In every age marked by cruelty, confusion, or decay, Goya returns. He never really leaves.

So today, I raise an ambivalent glass to Goya: the uneasy genius, the reluctant prophet, the reluctant courtier, the fierce satirist. He makes no promises of comfort, but he offers truth—and maybe that’s more valuable anyway.

Happy birthday, Francisco. You make it hard to look. But harder still to look away.