Jean - Luc Baroni Ltd

Goya

Print
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes

Fuentetodos 1746-1828 Bordeaux

The Eagle Hunter

 

 

Drawn with the point of the brush and brown ink and wash. Numbered by the artist upper right in the same medium 84. Numbered again, in another hand with dark brown ink: 38 and bears inscription in pencil along bottom edge: Dénicheur d’aigles

200 x 140 mm. (7 ⅞ x 5 ½ in.)

 

Sold to a Private Collection.

 

PROVENANCE: The artist’s son, Javier Goya y Bayeu (by 1828); Mariano Goya y Goicoechea (by 1854); Federico de Madrazo and/or Román Garreta y Huerta (by circa 1855-60); Paul Lebas, Paris; sale, Paris Hôtel Drouot, 3 April 1877, lot 53 ‘Dénicheur d’aigles to Emile Calando (11 Francs); E. Calando (L.837), his inscription in pencil at the bottom of the page: Dénicheur ‘aigles; E. Calando fils (bears his numbering, verso in pencil: 1472 and inscription: n.53 vente du ? rechercher le catalogue/ de dessins de Goya; by descent to Pierre Emile F. Calando (1904-1992); private collection, France.

 

EXHIBITED: Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst, Goya’s Realism, 2000, cat.4, illus.  

 

LITERATURE: Pierre Gassier, ‘Une Source inédite de dessins de Goya en France au XIX Siècle’, Gazette des Beaux Arts, series 6, col.LXXX, July-August 1972, p.113, no.53, not illustrated; Pierre Gassier, Les Dessins de Goya, Les Albums,  Paris 1973 or The Drawings of Goya, The Complete Albums,  London 1973, p.497, listed under ‘Lost Drawings’ as F.h.; Pierre Gassier, ‘Des oeuvre inedites de Goya’, L’oeil, Magazine International d’art, no.482, September-October 1996, pp.85-6 illustrated fig.3.

 

Born in the arid region around Saragossa, Goya’s family moved to the city when he was old enough to attend school. There he forged a lifelong friendship with Martin Zapater; their surviving correspondence is an important source of biographical information on the artist. At the age of 14, he entered the studio of an academic painter, José Lúzan y Martinez, remaining there for 4 years whilst attempting to be accepted into the Spanish Royal Academy in Madrid. At 20, having failed the entrance a second time, Goya left for Italy. Two years later, and enjoying some success, he returned to Spain to submit designs to the competition for the fresco decoration of the Basilica del Pilar in Madrid. He married Josefa Bayeu, member of a family of established artists, with whom he fathered seven children only one of whom, Xavier, survived. In 1775 Goya was invited to join the practice of the court painter Anton Rafael Mengs. Selected to work in the Royal Tapestry Factory, he produced a quantity of cartoons working with his brother in law Francisco Bayeu. Three years later, Mengs eventually allowed him to enter the Royal Palace where Goya was able to study the paintings of Velasquez. When Spain declared war against England in 1780, the tapestry workshop halted production and Goya moved back to Saragossa to collaborate with Francisco Bayeu. Their partnership collapsed and only a year later, Goya returned to Madrid, fortunate to receive a royal commission for an altarpiece in the church of San Francisco del Grande. Two years later, a portrait of Count Floridablanca, brought the artist to the King’s notice and with his election as Deputy Director of Painting at the Royal Academy in 1785 and a year later his appointment as Painter to the King, his success seemed secure. Six years later, however, he became extremely ill, possibly with Cholera, exacerbated by a stroke and was left deaf on his recovery. His portraits of the Duchess of Alba date from the period 1795-7 as does the start of his work on the albums of drawings which came to form such an essential and entirely unique aspect of his art. A large scale fresco in the new church of San Antonio de la Florida is one of the only grand projects which Goya was able to execute in these years but his relation with his second Royal patron, Charles IV remained strong and it was only the King’s protection which saved him from being hauled before the Inquisition on the publication of his series of etchings titled Los Caprichos.    The death of the Duchess of Alba in 1802 was followed the next year by that of Goya’s oldest friend Martin Zapater. This was a period of political upheaval in which the King abdicated and Spain was occupied by Napoleon’s troops. The artist joined a group of Republican liberals who came under threat with the reinstatement of Ferdinand VII in 1814; the next year he was finally summoned to appear by the Inquisition in response to his paintings known as Maja desnuda and Maja Vestida.  His wife had died in 1812 and by 1819 Goya had bought the house which became known as La Quinta del Sordo, the house of the deaf man, the walls of which he painted with a series of dark and esoteric scenes. Ill again, and under threat for his political views, in 1823 he successfully petitioned the King for permission to leave Spain and in 1824 settled with his housekeeper in Bordeaux. Apart from a brief return to Spain in 1826, to receive indefinite leave and a Royal pension, Goya spent the last four years of his life in France and, despite lamenting his failing eye sight, he produced forty miniatures on ivory, a series of lithographs on the subject of bullfighting, several portraits and two final albums of drawings. He died in France in 1828 but in 1901 his remains were re-interred in Madrid, in the church of San Antonio de la Florida.

It is thought probable that only his closest friends and family would have seen Goya’s series of eight albums of drawings in their original state. Created over a period of thirty years, the sheets which survive – a significant proportion of the roughly 550 drawings which he made – are compelling, magnificent evidence of Goya’s extraordinary sensitivity as a draughtsman, the uniqueness of his visual memory and imagination, and his profound engagement with the human condition. Goya’s son, Javier, took apart most if not all of the eight albums, after his father’s death. The pages were cut from the bindings and pasted into three larger volumes, with the order of his father’s careful numbering being mostly retained. On Javier’s death in 1854, these composite albums were themselves broken up and sold, the original sequencing being mostly destroyed. This next episode in the history of the albums appears to have been mostly controlled by Federico de Madrazo, then Director of the Prado, together with his brother-in-law, the only recently identified Foman Garreta y Heurta. Madrazo seems to have been responsible for removing the drawings from Javier’s three albums (more than 450 sheets, some of which were double-sided). Some three hundred appear to have been put aside, for sale or presentation, while the remaining number, seemingly those drawings which Madrazo had decided to keep for his own collection, were divided into three groups and numbered in three different ways, of which one is the numerals in the upper right corner within a curving bracket seen here. Some years later all the drawings which had not already been sold or given away were pasted on to sheets of pink paper. Madrazo’s declining fortunes, his loss of official posts and the confinement of his daughter to a Paris sanatorium, probably led to the sale at Drouot in 1877 of 105 of the drawings. The present sheet, part of this consignment, was purchased at that sale along with 9 others, by the discerning collector Emile Calando who though primarily a collector of French drawings, owned no less than 35 sheets by Goya.

This fascinating depiction of a peasant robbing an eagle’s next is at once comic and terrible. The huntsman hangs, perilously balanced, from the edge of the cliff, the rope taut around his middle and through the handle of his wicker basket. On his head is what looks like a pot, perhaps a copper cooking pot – protection against the sharp beaks of the eaglets - and his trousers appear to be to stuffed with padding but only look the more vulnerable for it, as the parent eagle approaches, talons outstretched, bearing a rabbit for the young.

The sheet belonged to the album known as F, Images of Spain in which Goya appears to have drawn on consecutive pages, numbering them in the top right corner. Though linked in theme to the eleven studies of huntsman, pages 96 to ­106 which are a unique example of the artist working consistently on a particular theme at a specific period, the present scene has a quite different tone, crueler and slightly satiric.  Juliet Wilson Bareau suggested that the hunting drawings may date from the period around 1819 when Goya had bought a farm in the countryside outside Madrid and was able to return to the sport he had so much enjoyed as a young man. This drawing, rather than being elegiac, highlights the vulnerability of man in nature and the extreme means used to plunder its treasures.

Album F contained the broadest array of subjects and style amongst any of the eight known albums, and indeed the subjects range from the violent to the pastoral.  As described by Juliet Wilson Bareau, its pages include ‘some of the most radiant and compelling images ever drawn by Goya’1. Similar in size to that known as the Inquisition album, it has been dated variously to 1817-20 by Eleanor Sayre 2 and more recently to an earlier and longer range of years by Juliet Wilson Bareau, who believes that it was at least partly filled in parallel with the Inquisition album, itself considered to have been completed before 1814. Wilson-Bareau describes the album sheets as coming from a bound Spanish notebook, which Goya may have acquired at a time, probably during the war, when good new paper was scarce3. The use of ordinary writing ink rather than Indian ink also suggests a dependence on inexpensive and commonly found materials. Since the album was bound, the order of the pages was set from the start and Goya is believed to have kept to that order as he worked.  

Presented with a ‘bird’s eye’ view of this impendingly dreadful scene, the present sheet incapsulates the unique nature of Goya’s visual imagination. Deceptively simple in its handling, it nevertheless shows extraordinary veracity and detail: the harsh sunlight on the cliff face, the tufts of grass at the entrance to the crevasse in which the nest is sheltered, the mans’ jacket stretched over his shoulders and the terrifying span of the eagle’s wings. As remarked by Pierre Gassier:  “On ne pourra jamais trop insister sure la verité stupefiante des attitudes inventées par Goya, travaillant de mémoire, chez lui, il recrée toutes ces scènes, comme si’il elle étaient saisies sur le vif …’4

 

1. See Juliet Wilson-Bareau, Goya, drawings from his private albums, exhibition catalogue, London, 2001, p.17.

2. Eleanor Sayre, ‘An introduction to the prints and drawings series’, in  Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment’, exhibition catalogue, Madrid, Boston and New York, 1988-9, pp. cxx-cxxi.

3. Juliet Wilson-Bareau, op. cit., p.91-92.

4. Pierre Gassier, op. cit., 1973, under Literature

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