Goya, Delacroix, and Meissonier

Here you will find three works of art from the realism period which focus on war history. With these works, a studio or the artist at work is not what is thought about, but the event itself.

The Third of May, 1808 by Francisco Goya, pg 487 in The World of Art

Francisco Goya's painting, The Third of May, 1808, is a firing squad; "the execution of citizens of Madrid by Napoleon's invading army" (Sayre, 2005). The painting is lit by a lantern with a man in a white shirt, arms outstretched as though he is surrendering. In the dark background you can see a shadowy church. This concentration of light, coming from low down, gives the feeling of a scene on the stage; and the buildings against the dark sky remind me of a backcloth. And yet the picture is far from being theatrical in the sense of unreal, for at no point has Goya forced or over emphasized a gesture. Even the purposeful repetition of the soldiers' movement is not formalized, as it would have been in official decorative art, and the hard shapes of their helmets seem to deliver their blows irregularly.

In the late 1700s Goya became completely deaf so gestures and facial expressions became vivid and images stayed in his mind. The tapestry designs show some of Goya's characteristics: his unequalled gift for memorizing movement. The crowds in the streets were silent to him and every experience reached him through the eye alone. At this time Goya was an official painter when he saw the Spaniards show a little fight on the second of May. It was the beginning of a series of brutalities which stamped themselves on Goya's mind and which he set down in the most horrifying record of war ever made in any medium. Goya was born in the age of reason and after his illness he was obsessed by all that could happen to humanity when reason lost control. In The Third of May he shows one aspect of the irrational, the predetermined brutality of men in uniform. By a stroke of genius he has contrasted the fierce repetition of the soldiers' attitudes and the steely line of their rifles, with the crumbling irregularity of their target. As I look at the firing squad I remember that artists have been symbolizing merciless conformity by this kind of repetition since the very beginning of art

The Third of May, 1808 was actually painted six years after the event occurred. Goya drew from memory, and as he thought about a scene its essence suddenly took shape in his mind's eye as a pattern of dark and light. In his first rough drawings these black and white blots tell the story long before any detail is defined. After his illness the stories are for the most part gruesome and the dialogue of light and dark is correspondingly sinister. Goya himself does not seem to have been altogether aware of how these shadows speak to us. Whereas they are a series of archetypal nightmares, in which the shadows on the nursery wall do really turn into a man hanging on a gibbet or a congress of goblins. The victims of power are not abstract. They are as shapeless and pathetic as old sacks; they are huddled together like animals. In the face of Murat's firing squad they cover their eyes, or clasp their hands in prayer. And in the middle a man with a dark face throws up his arms, so that his death is a sort of crucifixion. His white shirt, laid open to the rifles, is the flash of inspiration which has ignited the whole design.

This is the first great picture which can be called revolutionary in every sense of the word in style, in subject and in intention; and it should be a model for the socialist and revolutionary painting of the present day. Unfortunately social indignation, like other abstract emotions, is not a natural generator of art; also Goya's combination of gifts has proved to be very rare. Almost all the painters who have treated such themes have been illustrators first and artists second. Instead of allowing their feelings about an event to form a corresponding pictorial symbol in their minds, they have tried to reconstruct events, as remembered by witnesses, according to pictorial possibilities. The result is an accumulation of formulas. But in The