An Artist Abroad—VIII Goya At The Prado

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30042, 29 January 1963, Page 16

An Artist Abroad—VIII Goya At The Prado

[By M. T. WOOLLASTON}

My daily walk from the hotel to the Museo Prado took me through a region of shops that sold industrial and agricultural machinery, | motor-bikes and parts, and [ lawnmowers. The public ; grass was not mown; possibly, I thought, because long grass looked cooler, or they liked white-clover blossom. “Who uses the lawnmowers?” I asked. “Probably the British Embassy!” said one of its staff. Inside the museum was comparative coolness, and I could stay there all day, with a coffee break, and a leisurely lunch in the buffet I made Goya-tracks for myself, and soon could find my way to his works in many rooms. I looked perhaps longest at > his “Executions on the Third of May,” a picture I had sensed from reproductions. But what I had never known was how beautiful the colour and the dawn-light are, quietly blessing the victims of this terrible tragedy—as though Goya, while abating nothing of their fate, had bathed them in compassion. And the white of the central prisoner’s shirt in this picture is a demonstration of the beauty of which white paint is capable, with free and subtle variations of thickness and colour. Goya’s whites . become almost his signature-tune. They are greyed, or stained with yellow (but not all over) to make them harmonise with his glowing dull colours, and they shine out His pictures are much greyer and more sober than their reproduc- ; tions. I have before me as I write an open book that shows, on the opposite pages, reproductions of “King Charles IV on Horseback,” and “Queen Maria Louisa of Parma on Horseback”—each with an elegant delicately blue sky. In reality (I remember this quite well) Charles TV’s sky is a plain grey, painted all over the top of a formal tree'. Goya evidently decided to obliterate and did it rather thinly—and Maria Louisa’s is of a marvellous architecture of darker, brindled grey and a dim, blooming yellow. They are enormous paintings, for Kings’ quarters. One can follow from room to room the vulgar triumph of the same Maria Louisa—preening herself in a great white-and-gtdd dress—Jaunty and proud on horseback—and with her bullying leer and idiot’s mock charm ogling you from her central position in the great family portrait, vdsere she tiß a row of little teeth show above her twisted lower lip. (In Paris, In the Louvre, is a terrible Goya, a still life of a dead sheep’s head amidst

its butchered chop-bones, where these little teeth are again exposed in a tragic grin of death. Did Goya do it knowingly?) I heard a Spanish guide pronounce the painter’s name Gorzha,” or almost I reacted into stubborn English at first and then gradually lengthened my first syllable and got the "y” further back on my tongue. Another day I was in a room of Velasquez (for relief from Goya), where a guide was talking in a “foreign” language when two students, suddenly overcome with mirth, ducked their heads and ran from the room. I will never know what absurdity that guide was offering her innocent sheep. Daily my powers of appreciation were painfully distended, but I didn’t care, I deliberately overdid it “It takes four years to see the Prado,” said my Embassy friend. He was basing that on one visit a week, with plenty of time for the procenses of absorption. I, on the other hand, soon reached a stage where I stared uncomprehendingly at great paintings, hoping something from them might be percolating into my subconscious.