History Museum - Ciudad Juarez, Mexico - Goya Exhibit
What a delight it was to see that the museum had on display a reproduction of “The Shootings of May 3, 1808” by the famous Spanish Master Francisco Goya (1746-1828). Known as the “Father of Modern Art”, Goya was a leader of Romanticism and changed the way artists saw and depicted the world for centuries to come. No doubt, an art purest might find any reproduction a poor substitute for the original, but standing before this painting gave me a good idea of the grand scale on which Goya worked and encouraged me to do some research into his life.
When Goya was young he was eager to take life at face value and enjoy it. He became the Court Painter for Charles IV in 1799, and, it is said, enjoyed many love affairs with the well-to-do women of Madrid. But in his later life, he became more critical and began to question many aspects of European life of that era, particularly the cruelties of war he witnessed first hand during the French invasion of Spain. Entire books have been written about Goya’s “Black Paintings”, among which the one shown here was the first. War paintings from previous eras tended to center around a hero shown in triumph or defeat upon the battlefield and lend an aura of glory to the scene. Goya, however, in painting “The Shootings of May 3, 1808” (1814) wanted to show that often there is no noble purpose to the killings of the defeated by the victors.
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