Francisco Goya

Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes was born on 30 March 1746 in Fuendetodos, a small town in Aragon, and apprenticed around age thirteen under the painter Jose Luzan in Zaragoza. He moved to Madrid in 1763 to join the circle of Francisco Bayeu, whose sister Josefa he married in 1773, and financed his own study trip to Italy in 1770 and 1771, entering a painting competition in Parma along the way. He rose steadily through royal service: court painter to Charles III in 1786, painter to Charles IV in 1789, and First Court Painter, the top position, in 1799.

An illness in 1793 left Goya permanently deaf and pushed his work toward a darker, more personal register alongside his official portraiture. He produced Los Caprichos, a set of 80 satirical etchings, in 1799, and later Los Desastres de la Guerra, a set of 82 prints responding to the brutality of the Peninsular War, though it was not published until 1863, decades after his death. In his final years in Spain he covered the walls of his house, the Quinta del Sordo, with the 14 nightmarish murals now known as the Black Paintings, never commissioned and never intended for public display. Fearing reprisal under the repressive rule of Ferdinand VII, Goya left Spain in 1824 for self-imposed exile in Bordeaux, where he continued to work, completing La Tauromaquia and a late series of miniatures, until his death on 16 April 1828.

Goya's reputation rests on a rare double status: an artist fully inside the eighteenth century court tradition and, at the same time, one of the clearest bridges to modern art. Historians most often describe him as the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns, a framing earned by the arc from decorous royal portraiture to the raw satire of Los Caprichos and the unsparing brutality of the Disasters of War. His The Third of May 1808 is widely credited as a direct ancestor of Manet's Execution of Emperor Maximilian, and Picasso's Massacre in Korea is read the same way; La Maja Desnuda, a real, identifiable woman looking frankly out at the viewer rather than an allegorical nude, is commonly cited as a precedent for Manet's Olympia. The Black Paintings, discovered on the walls of his house after his death and later transferred to canvas, are treated by most critics as the clearest anticipation of Expressionism in his work, a private, unshowable body of imagery that reads as strikingly modern two centuries later.

Goya's painting market and his print market behave like two different assets. On the painting side, supply is extremely thin: most autograph paintings are in Spanish and other national institutions, and few remain in private hands. The current auction record was set on 25 January 2023, when a pendant pair, Portrait of Dona Maria Vicenta Barruso Valdes and Portrait of her mother, Dona Leonora Antonia Valdes de Barruso, both dated 1805, sold for a combined USD 16,420,000 with fees at Christie's New York, a various-owners lot backed by a third-party guarantee rather than a marquee single-owner sale. That result replaced a record that had stood for nearly three decades: Suerte de Varas, a bullfighting scene, made about USD 7.4 million at Sotheby's in 1992.

The print market is a different story. Complete, well-documented sets of Los Desastres de la Guerra or La Tauromaquia appear at Christie's, Sotheby's, and Bonhams with some regularity and have made anywhere from roughly USD 40,000 to the low hundreds of thousands depending on edition and impression quality, while individual plates and later-edition impressions trade far lower. For a collector priced out of the painting market, the prints are the genuinely accessible way to own a piece of Goya's hand, though impression generation and completeness of the set do most of the work in determining value.

The single most important fact about Goya as an asset is that his painting market and his print market are not the same market. Paintings are scarce, mostly museum-held, and a real sale is an event, as the 2023 pendant portraits demonstrated when the previous record had stood since 1992; buyers are effectively bidding on attribution and provenance as much as on the image itself. Prints are a different proposition entirely: Los Caprichos, the Disasters of War, La Tauromaquia, and Los Disparates circulate regularly at the major auction houses, offer a genuine range of price points by edition and impression, and are the practical entry point for anyone who wants documented Goya material without painting-market prices. Authentication discipline matters more than usual with this name: a 2023 Spanish police seizure of forgeries marketed for a combined EUR 76 million included four works sold as Goyas, a reminder that provenance and technical verification, not enthusiasm for the name, are what protect a buyer in this market.