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Francisco Goya  © Goya was an innovative painter and etcher and one of the great masters of Spanish painting.

Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes was born near Saragossa in Aragon on 30 March 1746. His father was a painter. Goya's formal artistic education began at the age of 14 when he was apprenticed to a local painter. In 1763 Goya went to Madrid and worked under another artist from Aragon, Francisco Bayeu, whose sister he married.

In 1771, Goya visited Italy. By 1775, he had settled in Madrid and was designing for the Royal Tapestry Factory. In 1786, he was appointed court painter to Charles IV.

In the winter of 1792, Goya became seriously ill and was left totally deaf. This was a turning point in his career. His paintings were transformed from his previous Rococo style to a more expressionistic vision and he chose increasingly dark subject matters.

During the brutal Napoleonic occupation of Spain, Goya saw at first hand the horrors of warfare. These inspired a series of etchings 'The Disasters of War' and two paintings '2 May 1808' and '3 May 1808'.

In around 1820, Goya began a series of frescoes on the walls of his country house near Madrid, which became known as the 'Black Paintings'.

In 1824, political upheavals in Spain forced Goya to go into exile in France. He returned to Madrid for a brief visit in 1826, but died in Bordeaux on 16 April 1828.