3254948

8/17/2019 3254948

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/3254948 1/6

Goya's Disasters of WarAuthor(s): William M. Ivins, Jr.Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Vol. 19, No. 9 (Sep., 1924), pp. 220-224Published by: The Metropolitan Museum of ArtStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3254948Accessed: 17-05-2016 23:22 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at

http://about.jstor.org/terms

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted

digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about

JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toThe Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin

This content downloaded from 143.107.3.190 on Tue, 17 May 2016 23:22:37 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

8/17/2019 3254948


BULLETIN OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

GOYAS DISASTERS OF WAR

Among the things which have been in

the Museum's collection of prints for several

years past and which have not as yet been

mentioned in the BULLETIN is a bound vol-

ume containing a fine set of the eighty

etchings and aquatints by Goya, known as

the Disasters of War. Although Goya died

in 1828, these plates were first published

in 1863, by the Academy of San Fernando,

and have since gone through many edi-

tions, the poor worn coppers still struggling

through a conscienceless press, which seems

bent upon doing what it can to bring one

of the most wonderful sets of etchings

ever made to shame and derision. Of

about half the series a few scattered im-

pressions printed before the edition of

1863 are known, but they are jealously

guarded in several of the European na-

tional collections, in 1910 only one such

impression being reported as still in pri-

vate hands.

From time to time reference has been

made in these columns to the vagaries of

taste and fashion, but nothing that has

been said can so point the moral as the

following short summary of what a few

writers and critics have said of Goya and

his etchings. Toward the middle of the

last century Passavant, whose name stands

with that of Bartsch, cited Goya as proof

positive of the low estate to which artistry

and taste had fallen in Spain at the end of

the seventeen hundreds. Ph. G. Hamer-

ton, whose initials have so curious a

pharmaceutical look, published in 1867 his

famous Etching and Etchers, which proba-

bly did more in the English-speaking coun-

tries than any other one book to popularize

etchings as things to be collected. He

was a gentle soul who loved to revile all

those who didn't see through the same set

of mid-Victorian eyeglasses that he did, and

so it comes as no shock to know that he re-

garded Goya's work with horror, called it

debased and degraded, said he knew noth-

ing of draughtsmanship--"An artist who

undertakes to illustrate the science of bull-

fighting ought at least to be able to draw

the parts of a bull "-and wound up by de-

claring, with bell, book, and candle, that

Goya didn't know how to etch.' In his third

edition Hamerton exalted M. Lalauze's

prowess as etcher

Ruskin once, it is reported, was so en-

raged by the sight of a set of Goya's prints

that, though it belonged to another man,

he put it in the grate and burned it up.

The Spaniard's name does not appear in the

index volume to the Complete Works of

J. R.-but then for that matter neither do

those of Ingres, or Delacroix, or Corot;

though perhaps they were regarded merely

as French painters and not as modern ones.

In the appendix which he supplied to his

188o edition of Maberly's The Print Collec-

tor, the late Robert Hoe, one of the greatest

collectors of modern times, said: "The work

of Meryon, weird and replete as it is with

the vagaries of a vagabond imagination, is

tame when compared to the artistic ravings

of Goya. It is difficult to describe them

or their incoherencies. At the same time,

their claim as artistic productions cannot

be disputed, nor his name erased from the

catalogue of Spanish artists. . . . Many

of them are puerile in their execution, while

others are works of a high order of genius."2

1"As a practical aquafortist . . . I can-

not admit that he was an artist at all, I cannot

admit that he ever got beyond a rash and auda-

cious dilettantism. . . Goya was original in

manner, because he took up the process without

profiting by the experience of his predecessors;

but ignorance is generally original, for it has no

traditions." And again--"the combination of

ignorance with assurance never ended in the pro-

duction of art more hideously corrupt." A little

further on, however, just to balance things and

make all even, P. G. H. said, " If the reader takes

an interest in modern French painters, the name

of Corot must be familiar to him. . The

first impression of an Englishman, on looking at

his works, is that they are the sketches of an

amateur: it is difficult, at first sight, to consider

them the serious performances of an artist .

His attempts in etching are interesting, but quite

without value as art; he is a still worse draughts-

man than Daubigny, and either cannot or will

not draw so much as a leaf or a branch.

It is very much what a second-rate yet true poet,

quite ignorant of drawing, would be likely to

produce.

2 It is amusing, in passing, to recall this other

passage from a neighboring page in the same

book: "At this time the French school stands at

the head, and with the exception of Seymour

Haden, there is no one now in England who can be

ranked above mediocrity, unless it be Whistler."

220


8/17/2019 3254948



Georges Duplessis, also writing in I88o,

called attention to Goya's method of mix-

ing etching and aquatint, and said that on

account of it his prints will "always be

looked for as providing interesting and

novel specimens of a kind of engraving that

none of his predecessors had utilized."

But, of course, as compared with Hamer-

ton, the English journalist and amateur

etcher, Duplessis, who was merely con-

servateur-adjoint in the print room of the

In at least one respect Sir Frederick was

like her late majesty-they used to say

that if one knew what she thought one

knew what her most loyal subjects thought.

In 1908, Arthur M. Hind, of the British

Museum and now also Slade Professor at

Oxford, wrote, in thorough seriousness, "In

Francisco Goya we meet one of the great

names in the whole history of etching."

And in 1910 Valerian von Loga of the

Berlin Print Cabinet began his book on

1 41

MADRE INFELIZ

FROM THE DISASTERS OF THE WAR BY GOYA

Bibliotheque Nationale, could hardly be

expected to know.

Sir Frederick Wedmore, a collector who

used great judgment in the swing of the

market and who succeeded Hamerton as

the favorite English critic of Fine Prints,

while making no mention of Goya in the

first edition of his book with that title,

found room for a chapter on him in his last

volume entitled simply Etchings. How-

ever perfunctory a criticism it was, the fact

that it was there, and that Goya was spo-

ken of as the greatest etcher between Rem-

brandt and Meryon, meant more than any

words-for Sir Frederick never would have

made the trip down to Bloomsbury to look

at them had some one worthwhile not told

him that he simply mustn't, really couldn't

afford to leave Goya out of his big book.

Goya's prints with the sentence: "Among

the graphic artists of modern times Goya

preempts the leading place."

Some of the artists had their opinions

about Goya, too, for Delacroix carefully

copied many of his etchings in pen and

wash, and Manet most obviously was no

stranger to his prints.

In view of all this chorus of execration,

toleration, and praise, it is difficult to come

to any general second-hand and therefore

authoritative opinion as to what one should

think about Goya's etchings, and the prob-

abilities are that every one will have to de-

cide for himself.

For three years the Curator of Prints had

been trying to get a start for an article

about the Disasters of War, but everything

he did came out flat and stale. One par-

221


8/17/2019 3254948



ticularly sultry evening he had worked late

on the veranda, the family long since in bed,

and the magic circle of the lamplight on his

table, if anything, more wonderful than

usual because of the open air and the

soft lapping of the bay at the foot of the

bank-but nothing came of it except more

sheets of clean white paper spoiled by

black ink. At last just as the moon came

up over the far water's edge he gave in, and

taking the first book at hand threw himself

in an easy wicker chair for a few minutes

with another man before putting the lights

out. It was a dumpy, fat, shabby, little

book, printed long ago at Amsterdam, and

the first lines on the first page, for it was

there that it opened, were: "Personne n'est

exempt de dire des fadaises: le malheur est,

de les dire curieusement," and they were

followed at a short interval by these, "Je

parle au papier, comme je parle au premier

que je rencontre: qu'il soit vray, voicy

dequoy." It was as though old Michel him-

self had stepped out of the night and easily

and exactly pointed out the curator's

trouble. Des fadaises, dites curieusement--

that after all was what the curator had

been trying to do, and it was time to stop

and begin talking to the paper as though it

were the first person he met, to tell it the

facts as he knew them of his own experience.

He has never forgotten the wild excite-

ment of the day when as a lad of twenty,

passing through Paris on his road to the

university, he found another copy of this

same 1863 edition of the Disasters of War

in Rapilly's shop on the quai;or how parting

with the sum of sixty francs he took the

book with him to Munich, where poring

over it night after night he learned far more

from its pages than from all the lectures of

the Professor Doctor Rector Magnificus, no

matter how learnedly and complacently

that great dignitary rasped out his es-ist-

leicht-Zu-ersehen's from his so celebrated

nationaliakonomisches point of view. Per-

haps had one not lingered upon the quai

Malaquais that pleasant day in the early

summer, there hard by the Mazarin, he

would not have met the Disasters, and in-

stead of making such a disaster of his own

education, would have proceeded dutifully

to the parentally desired degree, and, eras-

ing the Cand. Phil. from his calling card,

have stood forth in glory as a full-fledged

doctor of philosophy. But Goya put an

end to all that and to various other dreams

of his father's, and, having pushed the lad

upon a strange and unforeseen path, has

eventually brought him to writing articles

of a sort about prints (and occasionally

some other things) for a museum bulletin.

As one looks back one remembers that

prior to that afternoon on the quai the boy

had seen a few old prints, had lived with

several in his room as an undergraduate,

and even that there had been mixed in

with them some modern ones, a Whistler or

two, several Hadens, and an odd Meryon-

but Goya he had never seen and had read

of only in the pages of Hamerton. The

prints he knew were nice; yes, but so much

less exciting than an equal amount of

money put into books, and so infinitely less

important than that number five seat in

the waist of the boat. At best they were

but graces for the study walls-a little to

be talked about, a little to be teased for,

and on occasion to serve the same purpoge

as the undergraduate's gold watch. They

are hitched up in some dream-like man-

ner and recollection with that volume of

Sidney's verse acquired, the last year in

college, principally because of the heading

of a page, which, as one remembers, ran

somewhat like this: "These foure sonnetts

were written to his lady when she had a

paine in her face."

These things, however, these Goyas, stum-

bled upon quite accidentally in the late

afternoon of a beautiful sunny day, the

pink flush of excitement at first meeting

Paris still fresh upon him, were most amaz-

ingly different. They were deadly serious,

they were human and masculine and full

of strong emotion, and he reacted to them

as hitherto he never had to anything but

the pistol shot from the starter's boat or

the sway of the music in the lines of some

old verse. Only they were somehow differ-

ent from either of those things; for the race

was sport-if beaten, one was at worst but

lifted from the boat temporarily exhausted;

and the lines were sport too, sonorities

and echoes that rarely rang true, because

the lad not yet having lived was no proper

222


8/17/2019 3254948



sounding-board to catch and hold their

emotion; but these were things seen, actual

experiences, which set blood and anger

and pity coursing more violently through a

frame hardened by five years' training than

anything ever before experienced. The lad

began to live, it having for the first time

been brought home to him that his eyes

were there to see with.

He lived with these stout-stomached

things before his eyes for years afterwards,

them in the background of thought it is

doubtful whether he could ever have appre-

ciated the older or the younger men, would

ever have endeavored, however faultily,

towards a comprehension of many things

totally foreign to the legal and political

family tradition that had been so dominant

through youth and early manhood.

Made there where the ancien regime

turned into the nineteenth century, they

stood at the cross-roads pointing both ways,

v_ -

_._

-? r1

NO SE PUEDE MR R

FROM THE DISASTERS OF WAR BY GOYA

carrying them about with him as part of

his reading, as douches of the most brutal

reality with which to cleanse his sight from

the mists and cobwebs of pictorial con-

vention and prettiness. Always he came

back to them after his adventures with

other modern prints, the landscapes and

architecture, the greengrocer's stalls, and

the draped models, through which so many

men have sought expression, for he found

in their rank humanity and their great de-

sign the same kind of clean relief that a

chapter of Poincard, the other Poincar6,

brought after a debauch of cloudy elo-

quence. They took his feet, or at least so

it seemed, back on occasion to the hard

ground of reality, ever emphasizing the fact

that reality is both the most wonderful and

the most elusive of all things. Without

through Tiepolo and the Venetians straight

across the eighteenth century to Rem-

brandt in the seventeenth and on beyond

him to the giants of the Renaissance; while

in the other direction, as one found out

later on, just as the shadow of their magic

touched Delacroix and Manet, so the path

they indicate goes down over the horizon.

In infinitely many ways the trace of the

Disasters and the other Goyas which fol-

lowed them in experience is still strong

upon the man's mind, as though like some

powerful dye they had worked their way

into the woof of his thought and colored it

indelibly. Certainly it will never be quite

possible for him to take an unbiased atti-

tude toward them, to see them impartially

or fairly, for about them still lingers the

memory of that first great visual emotion.

223


8/17/2019 3254948



Were one to say what one really thinks, it

would not be thought sufficiently cold or

museological for these staid and too often

professionally bored pages-but there are

things which come home to even the hardest

shelled curator. W. M. I., JR.

LECTURES

MCMXXIV-MCMXXV

LECTURES FOR MUSEUM MEMBERS

THE DECORATIVE ARTS OF FRANCE, by

Edith R. Abbot. Seven Tuesdays, Feb-

ruary io through March 24, at I1:30 A. M.

STUDY-HOURS FOR HOME-MAKERS AND

MEMBERS, under the direction of Grace

Cornell. See page 225.

STORY-HOURS FOR MEMBERS' CHILDREN,

by Anna Curtis Chandler. Saturdays:

From November I through March 28, at

IO:30 A. M.

LECTURES-GENERAL

SUNDAY COURSE. Sundays: November 2

through March 29, at 4 P. M.

SATURDAY COURSE. Saturdays: November

I through March 28, at 4 P. M.

LECTURES AND GALLERY TALKS on AMER-

ICAN ART, on the occasion of the opening

of the American Wing. Mondays: No-

vember 17 through January 5, at 3:30

P. M.; Tuesdays: November 18 through

December 3o, at 3:30 P. M.

THE WONDERS OF INDUSTRIAL ART and

MASTERPIECES OF EGYPTIAN ART. Two

lectures in English by M. Jean Capart,

of the Musdes Royaux du Cinquante-

naire, Brussels, Belgium. Thursday af-

ternoons, January 8 and 15, at 3:30 P. M.

THE ARTHUR GILLENDER LECTURES FOR

ARTISANS (Jessie Gillender Foundation).

Sundays: November I6, 23, 30, Decem-

ber 7, 14, 28, January 4, II, 18, March

I, 8, 15, and 22, at 4 P. M.

GALLERY TALKS, by Elise P. Carey. Sat-

urdays: November I through March 28,

at 2 P. M.; Sundays: November 2 through

March 29, at 3 P. M.

LECTURES FOR THE DEAF AND DEAFENED

WHO READ THE LIPS, by Jane B. Walker.

Saturdays: November 15, January 24,

March 7, and April 25, at 3 P. M.

STORY-HOURS FOR CHILDREN, by Auna

Curtis Chandler. Sundays: October 5

through April 26, at 2 and 3 P. M.

LECTURES IN CO6PERATION WITH UNIVER-

SITIES AND COLLEGES

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, twelve courses by

Professors Fiske Kimball, Richard Off-

ner, R. M. Riefstahl, John Shapley, and

assisting specialists.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, four courses by

Professors Ernest DeWald and J. D.

Young.

TEACHERS COLLEGE, one course by Pro-

fessor Grace Cornell.

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, for

all university students, four courses by

Edith R. Abbot, Museum Instructor, and

Gisela M. A. Richter, Associate Curator

of Classical Art.

LECTURES FOR PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHERS

AND CLASSES

LECTURES AND CONFERENCES FOR PUPIL

TEACHERS OF THE NEW YORK TRAINING

SCHOOL, by Ethelwyn C. Bradish. Dates

to be announced.

TALKS FOR CLASSES IN THE VOCATIONAL

SCHOOL FOR BOYS, by Richard F. Bach.

Thursdays: May 21, May 28, and June 4.

Hours to be announced.

TALKS FOR CLASSES IN HIGH SCHOOLS, by

Ethelwyn C. Bradish. Wednesdays:

Fall Term, October I through December

lo; Spring Term, February 4 through

May 27, at 3 P. M. Fridays: Fall Term,

October 3 through December 12; Spring

Term, February 6 through May 29, at

IO A. M

TALKS FOR ELEMENTARY AND JUNIOR HIGH

SCHOOL TEACHERS, by Anna Curtis

Chandler. Semi-monthly: September

through April, at 3:30 p. M.

STORY-HOURS FOR PHYSICALLY HANDI-

CAPPED CHILDREN, by Anna Curtis

Chandler, October 7, November 13, De-

cember 8 and I I, February 9, March 5

and 17.

STUDY-HOURS ON PRACTICAL SUBJECTS

FOR PRACTICAL WORKERS

Group I. Five Sundays, 3-4:30 P. M.,

October 12 through November 9.

224

This content downloaded from 143.107.3.190 on Tue, 17 May 2016 23:22:37 UTCAll use subject to http://about jstor org/terms

Documents

3254948