1797–99, a series of eighty etched fantasies and commentaries on contemporary society. This brief liberal interval at court probably inspired the artist to complete “ Los caprichos,” ca. The year began auspiciously enough, as the Spanish king Carlos IV turned to a group of progressive statesmen to address the country’s growing economic crisis.Some months before, Goya had painted one of them, the poet turned jurist Juan Meléndez Valdés in March 1798, he painted a full-length portrait of Meléndez’s mentor, the recently appointed minister Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos. Encompassing more than 150 oil paintings, etchings, lithographs, and drawings in chalk, pencil, wash, and pen and ink, “Goya,” a major exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, elucidates the artist’s complexity, which is more concisely illustrated by works on view that exemplify the scope of his production during a single year: 1798. Between this alpha and that omega lies Goya, who defies categorization by period (his work is hardly Neoclassical, but it’s not Romantic either) or by genre any attempt to neatly package his work inevitably leads to contradictions. During his final years in Bordeaux, he drew in crayon, developed an innovative technique for miniatures, and exploited the potential of lithography.

THE FIRST WORK firmly attributed to Francisco Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) is a reliquary cabinet, today lost, painted in Zaragoza, Spain, in the late-Baroque style of his teacher José Luzán Martínez. Francisco Goya y Lucientes, Milagro de San Antonio de Padua (Miracle of Saint Anthony of Padua), 1797, oil on canvas, 10 1⁄4 × 14 1⁄2'.

Janis tomlinson goya