Francisco José De Goya Y Lucientes

Goya y Lucientes, Francisco José de (1746–1828) Spanish painter and engraver. A severe illness (1791) provoked a vein of fantastic works, one of the most vicious and sinister of which is Los caprichos, a series of 82 engravings published in 1799. Goya enjoyed the royal patronage of Charles IV despite mercilessly realistic paintings such as The family of Charles IV (1800). His bloody scenes The Second of May, 1808 and The Third of May, 1808 portray the Spanish resistance to the French invasion. Still obsessed with the dark side of the human psyche, his last works are the so-called Black paintings, 14 murals in sombre colours in which Goya unleashed yet more horrors from his tortured imagination.