The Politics of the Grotesque: Goya's Caprichos and French Literature and Graphic Art in the Nineteenth Century (c.1799-1868) (2024)

Valentín Carderera and the dissemination of Goya’s graphic work in France

The Burlington Magazine, 2020

Appreciation of Goya’s work in nineteenth-century France owed much to the endeavours of the artist Valentín Carderera. Unpublished correspondence reveals how he distributed prints and drawings from his major collection of Goya’s work by sale or exchange among artists, writers and historians, including Prosper Mérimée and Gustave Brunet.

Delacroix after Goya’s ‘Caprichos’: A New Sheet of Drawings

The Burlington Magazine, 2019

A newly discovered sheet of copies of details from two of Goya’s Caprichos is here identified as one of many drawings that Eugène Delacroix made of prints by the man he described as ‘a great artist whose compositions and energy have so often inspired me’.

La Fontaine, Goya, Grandville: A Study of Visual and Literary Sources

Print Quarterly, 2023

This article argues that the French caricaturist and draughtsman Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard, known as J. J. Grandville (1803–47), used plates from Goya’s Caprichos (1799) as inspiration for his illustrations to Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables and Cent Proverbes (1845), as well as other illustrated books. In turn, it is also noted that La Fontaine’s Fables were the source of some of Goya’s Caprichos and Desastres de la guerra (Disasters of War) prints (1810–14). Examples of Grandville copying Goya, as well as of Goya using images from La Fontaine are here presented.

On Goya’s Disasters of War, Plates 69 and 36

Print Quarterly, 2019

The article points out that the changes in the first edition of Francisco Goya’s print series Disasters of War made by the Royal Academy in 1863 have had lasting consequences. The changes to two titles introduced between the handwritten caption on the artist’s proofs from the so called Céan Bermúdez album and their engraved versions in the Royal Academy’s first edition of the series are discussed here. In the case of plate 69, the reasons for the title change are recalled, while for plate 36 an explanation and interpretation of the original handwritten title is proposed that has been overlooked in Goya studies. Finally, an unknown impression of that print is introduced, with the engraved title in its initial state before correction. Published in Print Quarterly XXXV (2018): 280-293

Goya IMAGES OF WOMEN

Stirling, Ford, and Nineteenth-Century Reception of Goya: The Case of the Santa Justa and Santa Rufina : 'Abomination' or 'Appropriate Composition'?

Hispanic Research Journal, 2007

Goya's frescoes in San Antonio de la Florida and José María Galván's etchings after them

Goya's frescoes in San Antonio de la Florida and José María Galván's etchings after them, 2021

The frescoes of San-Antonio de la Florida, regarded by many as Spain's Sistine Chapel, are the capital work of Goya, both for the importance of the surface decorated and because the artist revealed himself in this work with his true character and unique temperament. Although this church is at most a chapel (Ermita), the figures measure two meters and thirty centimeters, and the compositions fall into the category of monumental paintings by their number, their arrangement and their sequence. It can also be said that the Spanish pictorial revival sprang from the ashes of the 1798 Florida Frescoes and that the paintings, particularly the miracle of Saint Anthony of the dome, give birht to Goya's so-called expressionism developed in in Los Caprichos (1799) and all his future art. For the first time, Goya was able in La Florida to paint frescoes without eclesiastic or bureaucratic supervision, needing only the approval of the King. And he used the opportunity to end an era of religious painting, turning the same subjects into secular ones. In the absence of photography, the Florida frescoes were publicised in the nineteenth century by means of engravings, and this book is also centered on the most beautiful rendering into etchings that the frescoes have ever inspired. Painter and engraver José María Galván (1837-1899) was one of the leaders of the renovation of the engraving art in the nineteenth century in Spain, particularly through the publications El Arte en España (1862-1869) and El grabador al aguafuerte (1874-1876), and which occurred at the same time as similar groupings were formed in France (Sociéte des Aquafortistes de Cadart, Société des aquafortistes français). Galván worked on the frescoes on two occasions. The first etchings were realized in 1874 and were published in the portfolios of El grabador al aguafuerte between 1874 and 1876. Galván chose to make in 1878 an oil copy of the frescoes as a preliminary study to proceed to etch and re-engrave Goya's paintings, this time in their definitive form of sixteen plates with a total of twenty seven engravings. That version earned him a second-class medal at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in 1878 and ten years later he published the collection in a book.

A Melancholic Artist and a Choleric Publisher in Honoré Daumier's Print Series L'Imagination

Nineteenth-century art worldwide, 2017

Gal Ventura, 2018 "Pain as Resistance: Carnal Suffering and Political Protest in Honoré Daumier's L'Imagination Series," Konsthistorisk tidskrift: Journal of Art History (2018): 1-29.

The Colic (La Colique) and The Headache (Le mal de tête), two lithographs based on drawings by Honoré Daumier, produced as part of the series L’Imagination, were executed by the artist in 1832, during the final weeks of his incarceration at Dr. Pinel’s mental hospital, where he was sent as a penalty for the publication of the caricature Gargantua. This article addresses the singularity of both lithographs in relation to the other prints in the series, claiming that Daumier embedded socio-political elements in them, imbuing the visual representations of physical pain with a social commentary on Louis-Philippe’s pro-bourgeois regime. Based on the identification of the man suffering the stomach ache as Philipon, the article argues that The Colic and The Headache are, in fact, symbolic portraits of the publisher and the painter during their joint incarceration. Alluding to the pretext for which they were transferred to Pinel's institution, on the basis of medical declarations of the prisoners' health problems, the article argues that Daumier integrated these veiled portraits into L’Imagination in order to convey his criticism of the political causes of their incarceration. Through a rigorous analysis of the two lithographs in the context of contemporary French medical literature, as well as in comparison to the British and Spanish prints that inspired them, the article argues that, due to the lack of a visual depiction of the causes of the illness or of its treatment, they constitute socio-psychological symptoms that reflect visual resistance in a period of censorship and suppression.

Gal Ventura, 2017, "A Melancholic Artist and a Choleric Publisher in Honoré Daumier's print series L'Imagination," Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (Autumn, 2017).