Francisco Goya de Salvador

On my great-grandmother’s side (Maria Carmen Salvador), we find that Francisco Goya (the noted Spanish painter) was related.  The house that Goya was born back in March 30, 1746 and lived is not far from Zaragoza, in the town of Fuendetodos, no more than 35 miles directly south.

Goya’s house in Fuendetodos, Aragon

He is considered the most important Spanish artist of late 18th and early 19th centuries and throughout his long career was a commentator and chronicler of his era.  

Immensely successful in his lifetime, Goya's late works have been highly influential and he is often referred to as both the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns.

Francisco Goya

 He studied painting from age 14 under Jose Luzan y Martinez and moved to Madrid to study with Anton Raphael Mengs.  He married Josefa Bayeu in 1775; the couple's life together was characterized by an almost constant series of pregnancies and miscarriages.  

He became a court painter to the Spanish Crown in 1786 and the early portion of his career is marked by portraits commissioned by the Spanish aristocracy and royalty. 

Back in Zaragoza, where I lived as a child, he had painted a fresco in one of the ceiling domes of the magnificent cathedral Virgen del Pilar, so we didn’t have to travel to Madrid to the Prado Museum to see his work.

It is interesting that my mother married an artist herself.  My father was a bit of a Renaissance man, self-taught, and accomplished as an oil painter, furniture builder (without the use of a single nail, all tongue and groove and wooden dowls), wood and alabaster carver, photographer, a published writer and a very, versatile art restorer specializing in the repair of 18th and 19th century oil paintings, sculptures, paper mâché and other fine pieces of art.

Goya would have been proud of my father!