According to the third worksheet on Francisco Goya, the Spanish romantic artist, Goya’s artwork was “a reaction to the preceding traditions, which entailed both a departure from traditional pictorial narrative and the creation of meaning through the reformulation of specific images, ” and can therefore be defined as one of the first modern painters. The Family of Carlos IV is also a modern reaction to the French Revolution. Relating to time, the portrait was after the French Revolution and also the execution of the King at the guillotine. Napoleon Bonaparte had assumed power and the Spanish monarchy was no longer French. To create a new “purely Spanish” image, Goya paints (with reference to his Spanish painter counterpart Velazquez) he paints a modern group portrait with shown familiar intimacy instead of the …show more content…
Confronted with this task other artists would illustrate the tapestry with a series of cartoons that followed a central theme, or like Houasse, create scenes with a “generic familiarity”. Goya instead was the first artist to choose a contemporary theme, created scenes that “give us a view that incorporates characters from all classes, and even from other regions and countries”. The Crockery Vendor shows a Valencian man (identified by his clothing, which Goya did frequently in his tapestry cartoons) sitting down pointing to the left off-canvas. Looking at the title of the cartoon, the man is trying to sell items to his female customers, but a “lower class” flirtatious interaction can be seen with his body placement and hand gestures. This type of interaction wouldn’t be seen in his previous Fair of Madrid showing the higher class. Goya’s paintings in this series are individually narrated but structurally cohesive as he shows everyday life with a view of many of the