The Technical Originality in Goya's Drawing and his Contemporaries': Approaches to Drawing in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

In Spain, drawing instruction was reinforced and systematized thanks to the opening of official academies and drawing schools during the second half of the eighteenth century. These academies and schools taught a comprehensive working method involving successive phases to define all of the elements of pictorial composition. The most significant Spanish artist of the time, Francisco de Goya, made varied use of drawing by experimenting and adapting techniques to his preferences and expressive capabilities. However, Goya was not alone, since other artists worked in the same fields as him. Was Goya the only artist to experiment and alter drawing techniques? Did the rest of his contemporaries merely adhere to the academic style? In order to answer these questions, the techniques and drawing styles of other artists during the period are analyzed and compared with those utilized by Goya. To accomplish this analysis, this paper studies Goya's and his contemporaries' extant drawings, which are kept in both Spanish and international collections. Through the study of these drawings, this paper seeks to take into account the artists' learning and working processes, as well as the ideas that prevailed at the time that are gathered in diverse documents and studies. The results reveal that Goya was not the only one to experiment, since artists used different drawing techniques based upon what suited them best according to their working method, artistic expressive needs, and preferences.

Keywords:
Goya; drawing; techniques