Journey to a painting: 'The Prairie of San Isidro', by Goya
I confess that many times I have wished that my life resembles a Goya cartoon . Not you? Just imagine it: good company, comforting wine, green hills, merry dances, Boccherini music and strawberry trees hanging in abundance. Who can not like all that.
And who can be surprised that when the Spanish nobility at the end of the 18th century -them and they- was leaving the party to put aside the French style to stuffing oneself with colors and bows, and embroideries, nets and jets, what an illusion, what a fantasy.
The painting recreates the area of Madrid located between the hermitage of San Isidro and the Manzanares river
This was when countesses and duchesses of higher rank They dressed up as a cool girl from Lavapiés: of a Lavapiés that never existed and of an impossible cool girl, because let's see how much he paid for all those meters of velvet and silk satin and those fabulous applications sewn by very wise hands, but that is the least of it now.
Why are we going to get demanding with realism, if reality does not offer us much for this San Isidro that comes upon us but in return The Goyesque option is so close at hand.
Goya received in 1788 commissioned to design a series of tapestries with outdoor celebrations to decorate the rooms of the granddaughters of King Carlos III in the winter palace The brown.
Sabatini, the architect brought from Naples to finish off the Royal Palace Madrilenian, he had expanded that hunting lodge in the middle of nowhere where everyone was bored to death except precisely Carlos III, who to be the best mayor of Madrid spent a lot of time shooting for those lost mountains.
So as soon as the hunter king passed away, his son and his successor, Carlos IV, left El Pardo with the decoration half done to move his winters to Aranjuez , which had much more colorful gardens and better entertainment.
Total, that of all this coming and going one of the injured was Goya , who saw how his cardboard for tapestries remained in the attempt: only the blind hen would end up being produced as a *large-format oil painting. **
The blind man's hen, Francisco de Goya, 1789
And it's a shame, because it was planned that our Pradera became the goyesca work largest to date.
The one who must have rejoiced instead was the director of the Real tapestry factory, that he trembled every time he received a cardboard from the Aragonese painter. "Too much detail, too much light effect", it can't be that our craftsmen go crazy doing this", **so he protested black on white and signed in his own handwriting.**
To be fair, it is normal for him to complain. yes at a glance The Prairie of San Isidro It is monumental despite the fact that it only measures 42 by 94 centimeters, how would they have been seven meters planned.
Think of the worker who makes all those characters of different sizes at the stroke of a tap, the crowd that converges towards the center of the image, the ornaments of the suit, the radio of the buggy, the majo dancing, the puppy running around, the little finger pointing.
Exterior of the Palace of Aranjuez
Think of the subtle changes in the color palette, warm and elegant in the foreground, more intense and shadowy in the second, and again dim and pearly for the distance.
Think about how the nuances of that sky that seems a huge plate of mother-of-pearl hung over the Royal Palace and the dome of San Francisco el Grande. If the director of the Royal Factory thought so too, he would hang himself from the low-heel loom that was closest to hand.
But no such misfortune occurred, since this time the director got away with it. Failed the attempt to transfer it to a tapestry, the painting was bought by the dukes of Osuna , the finest and best cultivated couple of patrons then there was.
Time after, Goya would be appointed court painter to the king. And Carlos IV stayed in Aranjuez to be painted or for whatever happened. So everyone so happy.
In 1792, during a trip to Andalusia, Goya fell seriously ill. -Chemical poisoning? unknown virus? Syphilis? It is not well known- and from that set came out not only deaf, but also pre-romantic, What things are.
The work only measures 42 by 94 centimeters
The pictures he painted thereafter were the work of a colossus, and of an advance to romanticism, expressionism, conceptualism, to minimal, to whatever you want.
But today we are going to give thanks because it exists The Prairie of San Isidro, the painting in which we would like to live even if it was just such a day as today. Let's allow ourselves that license.