Charles IV of Spain and His Family
Charles IV of Spain and His Family is an oil-on-canvas group portrait painting by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya. He began work on the painting in 1800, shortly after he became First Chamber Painter to the royal family, and completed it in the summer of 1801.
Charles IV of Spain and His Family
The portrait features life-sized depictions of Charles IV of Spain and his family, ostentatiously dressed in fine costume and jewellery. Foremost in the painting are Charles IV and his wife, Maria Luisa of Parma, who are surrounded by their children and relatives. The family are dressed in the height of contemporary fashionable clothing and lavishly adorned with jewellery and the sashes of the order of Charles III.[1]
The painting was modelled after Louis-Michel van Loo's 1743 Portrait of Felipe V and his Family and Velázquez's Las Meninas, setting the royal subjects in a similarly naturalistic setting[2] as they pose for the artist who is visible at his easel at the left of the canvas.
The barely visible man in the background shadows at the left is Goya himself[5] (2). Others are, left to right:
Interpretation[edit]
The French writer Theophile Gautier called it a 'picture of the corner grocer who has just won the lottery' and it has sometimes been suggested that Goya was in some way satirising his subjects. The idea has been dismissed by the art critic Robert Hughes: "This is nonsense. You didn't manage to keep your job as an official court portraitist if you were satirising the people you were painting. No, this is not a send up. If anything it is an act of flattery. For instance on the left, in the blue suit, is one of the most odious little toads in the entire history of Spanish politics, the future King Ferdinand VII, whom Goya actually manages to make quite regal. God knows how he did it, but he has. This is very much an act of respect, almost verging on an act of flattery."[7]
Prominent in Goya's portrait are the domestic intimacy of the royal family and the central role of the queen as a matriarch. She exudes fecundity as she is flanked by her family. Far from a cruel satire, Goya's depiction of the royal family is actually idealized and disregards what the forty-eight-year-old Queen Maria Luisa actually looked like. A Russian ambassador described her eleven years prior to this painting: "Repeated births, illnesses, and perhaps a touch of hereditary illness had taken their toll--the yellow pallor of her skin and the loss of her teeth dealt a final blow to her beauty."[8] Granted, the queen's inane smile (formed by crude dentures), her sagging, pallid skin contrasted with sumptuous gown and jewels, and her overall appearance of doddering senescence, provide satirical fodder. But this subjective valuation is not only contrary to Goya's public presentation of his skills as an artist but to the artist's own apparent estimation of his consistent royal patron.[9]
John J. Ciofalo writes that while "Velázquez sought to bridge the gap between art and the reality of the natural world, Goya sought to bridge the gap between art and the reality of his own mind," a byproduct of the Romantic era. One only has to look at the paintings in Las Meninas that have been identified as real. The paintings in Goya's The Family of Carlos IV have never been identified. One could assume they are indeed products of Goya's mind, of his imagination.[10]