promise; his father and mother were poor peasants. The story of his
discovery by a monk of Saragosela--Father Felix Salvador of the
Carthusian convent of Aula Dei--is not missing. He studied with José
Martinez. He ran away in 1766. He remained, say some, in Italy from
1769 to 1774; but in 1771 he appeared in Saragossa again, and the year
1772 saw him competing for the painting about to be undertaken in the
cathedral. He married Josefa Bayeu, the sister of the court painter.
He has told us what he thought of his jealous, intriguing
brother-in-law in a portrait. In 1775 he was at Madrid. From 1776 he
executed forty-six tapestry cartoons. In 1779 he presented to the king
his etchings after Velasquez. His rise was rapid. He painted the
queen, with her false teeth, false hair, and her infernal simper, and
this portrait was acclaimed a masterpiece.

His religious frescoes, supposed to be _ad majorem Dei gloriam_, were
really for the greater glory of Goya. They are something more than
secular, often little short of blasphemous. That they were tolerated
proves the cynical temper of his times. When the fat old scoundrel of
a Bourbon king ran away with all his court and the pusillanimous
Joseph Bonaparte came upon the scene, Goya swerved and went through
the motions of loyalty, a thing that rather disturbs the admirers of
the supposedly sturdy republican. But he was only marking time. He
left a terrific arraignment of war and its horrors. Nor did he spare
the French. Callot, Hell-Breughel, are outdone in these swift, ghastly
memoranda of misery, barbarity, rapine, and ruin. The hypocrite
Ferdinand VII was no sooner on the throne of his father than Goya, hat
in hand but sneer on lip and twinkle in eye, approached him, and after
some parleying was restored to royal favour. Goya declared that as an
artist he was not personally concerned in the pranks of the whirligig
politic. Nevertheless he was bitterly chagrined at the twist of