intimate of Maria Louisa and the court circle, by no means abandoned
his friends the bull-fighters and tavern-keepers. Fresh from an
altar-piece for a cathedral, or a royal portrait, his ready brush
found employment in rapidly painting a street scene, or even a sign
for a wine-shop. A whitewashed wall for canvas and mud from the gutter
for pigment, were the means employed to embody a patriotic theme at
the entrance of the French soldiers into Madrid--a popular masterpiece
executed to the plaudits of the crowd.

All this would seem to denote a charlatan; yet withal, Goya has fairly
won his place amid the great painters of the world. Perhaps no better
example could be found of the essential difference between the outward
and visible actions of a man and the inward and spiritual grace of an
artist than in this instance; and the Latin standpoint, always more
intellectually liberal than our own Anglo-Saxon appreciation of the
same problem furnishes the reason why Goya was left free to pursue his
artistic career instead of languishing in prison. His illogical brush
filled the cathedrals of Saragossa, Seville, Toledo, and Valencia
with masterly frescoes, while with the etching needle he produced
many plates. Some of these, like the "Caprices," a series of eighty
etchings, are filled with imagination alternately tragical and
grotesque; while another series, representing bull-fights, throughout
its thirty-three plates depicts the incidents of the game with intense
realism. The "Disasters of War," another series of eighty, were
inspired by the French invasion; and never, perhaps, were the
cruelties of war more strenuously realized in art than in these.
Probably these etchings, executed, like all his works, by methods
peculiar to himself, constitute his best title to remembrance. But
his painting, replete though it be with the defects of his qualities,
stands as a precursor of the great coloristic school of which