My last engagement with Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) was the remarkable exhibition of his drawings of witches at the Courtauld last year. Scarcely less vivid was a showing of the Disasters of War prints in Barcelona I came upon some years ago. Where shock in art is concerned this is the real thing, making the efforts of contemporary provocatieurs seem tepid at best. This familiarity (to a degree) with the dark side of this painter's universe makes me a typically modern Goya viewer, more clued up on, and responsive to, his private nightmarish word than the official commissions that earned him a living - religious paintings, tapestry design and portraits. The last of these is the subject of the latest Sainsbury Wing exhibition. The prospect of seeing room after room of portraits of the Great and the Good does not set the pulse pounding; but this exhibition maintains and rewards attention throughout with what it reveals of a remarkable time in Spanish history, and of the relentless interests of its visual record-keeper.
The great and the good have never been less stiff or more exposed. Goya's approach as a portrait artist was precisely to put aside the expectations of pomp and circumstance. He took a strong interest in the personalities of his subjects. 'The Family of the Infante Don Luis de Borbón' (1783-4) is the product not of a formal sitting but of the artist's close familiarity with the exiled prince and his entourage. Although the composition is matching itself against the great forebear Velázquez, there is something Hogarthian in the vivid sense of character and animation in the scene. The same relaxed depiction of the person behind the title comes at us again and again, never more surprisingly than in 'Charles III in Hunting Dress' (1986-8), in which the dazzlingly ugly monarch grins at us, rifle in hand - a different image altogether from the usual portrayal of a king as soldier or wrapped in the robes of state. There was a wider cultural and political point to this: Spain was catching on to the enlightened stirrings going on over the Pyrenees, and Goya was part of this brief liberalising movement in Iberian government and high society. Thus we see young aristocrats enjoying the benefits of a modern education, the Duke of Alba nonchalantly leaning on a fortepiano while leafing through a new score, and family groups where children play, relaxed mothers display fashionable frizzed hairdos and a Rousseauian contentment prevails. The brushwork is correspondingly free and bravura, lovingly capturing the folds and textures of fashionable costumes and a range of expressions in his subjects (if the self-portrait drawing is anything to go by, sitting for Goya must have been a fairly unnerving experience).
The exposure to liberalism was to be a brief one. War with France, the Revolution, a short but profound Spanish Enlightenment, the Napoleonic Empire, Wellington's defeat of Napoleon and eventualy the restoration of the Spanish throne in the figure of the ghastly autocratic Ferdinand VII provide a narrative that gives the steady flow of portraits a compelling underlying dynamic. Certain qualities in Goya transcend the warp and woof chronicle time, such as the naturalism which makes the famous portrait of the Duchess of Alba and the double portrait of Charles IV and María Luisa such a fascinating, Shakespearean examination of human character in its many layers, pomp masking vulnerability, fancy lace mantillas at once ravishingly desirable and pathetically impotent in the face of encroaching age and illness. Friends are depicted with a total commitment to honesty: the architect Juan de Villanueva is shown with uneven eyes and crooked nose, the glint in his eyes an assurance by sitter and artist alike that friendship goes beyond surface errata, and even takes cheer in the natural deformities that nature and history bestow upon us all. In their deep sense of human character, the paintings seem out of their age, most strikingly perhaps in female subjects. Gainsborough could get nowhere near the range of feelings in the portraits of women here: 'Thérèse Louise de Sureda' (1804-6) or 'The Countess of Fernán Nuñez' (1803) are examples of the directness and autonomy of Goya's lady subjects which make orthodoxies of 'the male gaze' seem quite beside the point.
Goya's in-the-headlights frankness seems not to recognise any frontier. The pompous regalia of Fernado VII's portrait succeeds in bringing out the King's dangerous and malevolent stupidity (did Fernado see this? Goya was put through exhausting tests of his loyalty to the regime, and humiliatingly paired with an inferior as official painter to the court). The extraordinary 'Self Portrait with Doctor Arrieta', showing a Goya brought back from somewhere close to the dead, and surrounded by shadowy figures - the phantasms of the black paintings, perhaps - take this unflinching honesty into the realm of self-depiction. It is this capacity for looking at faces and recording them as they really are, for seeing the person whole, that makes the exhibition more than a collection of portraits, and turns it into a vision of life that we can take as a moral lesson. Those who knew Goya in his exile in Bordeaux - old, ill, profoundly deaf - remarked on his boundless curiosity in the world around him. There's a a black crayon self-portrait, with flowing white beard as he moves on two sticks, with the simple heading 'Aun aprendo' (I'm still learning). There was certainly much to be learned - about Goya, Spain, and looking - in this exhibition curated by Xavier Bray. I found the Spanish version of the audioguide extremely helpful. Bray and other experts warn us not to 'read in' the Goya of the Black Paintings into the portrait work, much of which was produced earlier; T J Clark in the LRB isn't so sure, noting points of tension in the background and composition that suggest inner dramas at work. I'm still at the much more basic stage of feeling I've met Spanish nobles and royals of over two centuries ago and listened in on their thoughts and conversations, seen them across the grave through the alchemy of art. How much truth, how much fiction in this vision? How much faith in the eyes and hand of the Master? Aun aprendo.
