We do not mean to make any hard and fast assertion that Goya would not have developed in intensity of feeling if he had not personally experienced and suffered the horrors of the invasion, but merely to indicate that it was this which brought about the revulsion within him and powerfully exalted him. His last years in Madrid, and afterwards in Bordeaux, where he died, were always characterized by the note of pessimism, and at times, of horror, as is shown in the paintings which once decorated his house and are now preserved in the Prado Museum. Not a few portraits of these years also show that the artist gained in intensity and in individual style. It is precisely these works, so advanced for their time and so progressive, that provided inspiration to painters like Manet, who achieved such progress in the nineteenth century, and who were enamoured of the visions of Goya, of his technique and his methods, naturalistic, perhaps, but always replete with observation and individual expression.
We must not forget to mention that Goya produced a decorative masterpiece of extraordinary distinction and supreme originality--the mural painting of the Chapel of St. Antonio of Florida, in Madrid. Nor is it less fitting to record his fecundity in the art of etching, in which, as in his painting, it is easy to observe the development of their author from a style gallant and spirited to an interpretation of deep intensity, such as is to be witnessed in the collection of “The Caprices” and “The Follies,” if these are compared with the so-called “Proverbs” and especially with “The Disasters of War.”
The pictures representing Goya at Burlington House were composed of some twenty works. Among those which belonged to his first period were the portraits of the Marchioness of Lazan, the Duchess of Alba, lent by the Duke of Alba, “La Tirana,” from the Academy of St. Fernando, the Countess of Haro, belonging to the Duchess of San Carlos, four of the smaller paintings of rural scenes, the property of the Duke of Montellano, and _An Amorous Parley_ (“Coloquio Galante”), the property of the Marquis de la Romana, the prototype of the Spanish feeling for gallantry in the eighteenth century. As representative of the second phase, of that which holds a note intense and pessimistic, may be taken _A Pest House_, lent by the Marquis de la Romana, and those truly dramatic scenes, the property of the Marquis of Villagonzalo.