The world of Goya

There is no use going to Lille for an eyeful of the voluptuous naked flesh that brought Goya into disrepute with the Spanish Inquisition. Apart from a few cannibals depicted in gory detail as they prepare their repast, everyone is fully clothed according to his station - rich fabrics and ornament for the noble and well-to-do, rags for the wretched occupants of Prison Interior who are illuminated in attitudes of despair by warm, hazy light.

The exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts is not large by international standards, but its contents have been assembled from several different sources, not all of them readily accessible to the public. Organised in four categories - genre paintings including tapestry cartoons, still lifes, portraits and religious subjects - it is intended to reflect Goya's life as well as the repressive period and society to which he belonged. Francisco Goya was born near Saragossa in 1746. After apprenticeship to a local painter, he sought entry to the Madrid Academy of Fine Arts but was refused and went to Rome instead. Returning to Spain after a few years, in 1773 he married Josefa Bayeu whose brother was a court painter, and presumably with the latter's encouragement, he moved to Madrid in 1775. His path was soon smoothed by the influential Count of Floridablanca who recognised talent when he saw it, and Goya secured a royal commission for no less than 29 "cartoons".

These oil paintings were used by the Royal Tapestry Factory as patterns for hangings in the palace apartments, and Goya's series reveals an immense enthusiasm for youth and playfulness and rural tradition. A collection of children's pastimes includes a large and realistic see-saw, a boy being tossed in a blanket and a game of saute- mouton, which is leap-frog to you and me. These are relatively simple designs, always executed with eagerness and almost palpable energy. Light was always of prime importance of Goya, and it informs these pictures to evocative effect, most notably in The Parasol where sunlight gleams on every fold of the girl's clothing and on her tranquil face.

At that time Goya possessed a vigorous sense of humour, expressed at its most amusing in The Fall which shows a noblewoman swooning (no other word for it) after slipping from her mule, while her companions indicate distress with gestures appropriate to the hammiest of amateur opera productions. A most astringent example of the painter's humour came later during his deafness with the extraordinary concept of Lazarillo de Tormes, in which a man grips a boy by the neck, holds the lower body firmly between his knees and forces two fingers into the victim's mouth. It is obvious that the child is not enjoying the process, but opinion is sharply divided between the possibility that this is a physician treating a reluctant patient, or a blind man exacting vengeance for the boy's substitution of a turnip for a sausage.

Either way, it is a brilliant enigma, and forms part of the 1812 Inventory made after the death of the artist's wife the same year. In this, the paintings that Goya kept for himself are listed, among them The Water Carrier and The Knife- grinder, both interpreted as allegories of Spanish resistance to French oppression; also and more famously, Time or The Old Women, Maja and Celestine on the Balcony and The Majas on the Balcony. The first two are displayed at the exhibition and make a formidable impact.

Gorgeously robed in diaphanous blue and gold, blond Celestine leans on an iron railing, staring rather vacantly into space, while behind lurks an aged crone, decked in monkish costume and clearly up to no good. In Les Vieilles two very old women are seated together consulting a mirror which bears the inscription Que Tal? - How are you doing? One wears a ravishing iridescent gown suitable for a woman many years her junior; the other is dressed in black, and in the background the winged figure of Time (no chariot) brandishes a broom with threatening intent. Both of these pictures exert a moral force more convincing than Goya's conventional religious studies, which to my mind, lack significant core and fervour.

There is no doubt that his temperament took a turn for the worse after the devastating attack of apoplexy which left him deaf from 1792 onwards, and this dark, inward-looking tendency is perhaps best illustrated by his first series of etchings, Los Caprichos, published in 1799. Those on show at Lille demonstrate an incisive drawing skill, coupled with a macabre imagination believed by some to presage the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars.

Less appealing, in fact thoroughly repellent, are the still lifes from the Inventory. Shocking in their verisimilitude, they are surely enough to turn any sensitive soul vegetarian, and it is hard to accept the verdict of one commentator who insists that Goya paints dead animals as if they were human beings. This can hardly be considered fair judgment of one of the greatest portrait painters of all time, a man who consistently applied a compassionate if penetrating eye to his subjects. Twenty of his 250 portraits are shown at the exhibition, separated chronologically into those before and after 1800 - by which time the incipient decline of Church and State introduced changes in hierarchical values, enabling any man of distinction to have his likeness wrought in paint, and his wife's, too.

Goya was appointed painter to the royal family when Charles IV came to the Spanish throne in 1789. The well-known study of the King, his queen and their prolific brood of young remains in the Prado in Madrid, but at Lille there is an individual portrait, not unanimously authenticated, of MarieLouise wearing a turban and gowned in the diaphanous materials the artist loved and portrayed with mastery. She has a calm regard, almost an inscrutability, and this is common to most of Goya's women - though there is a hint of discrete, even rueful, coquetry about the mouth of the actress, Antonia Zarate, whose impressive portrait is on loan from Dublin's National Gallery.

Goya's men are something else again. Intelligence, human experience, dignity and vanity are variously expressed according to the personality of the sitter, with an element of humour surviving in such studies as the young Count of Fernan Nunez, his shapely leg bared through a garment that closely resembles the long, slit skirts in fashion today. Every one of these portraits demands intense and protracted attention, repaying it with escalating pleasure and appreciation, while at least one of them must provoke lively speculation.

Three-year old Manuel Osorio, son of the noble dwarf, the Marquis of d'Astorga and Lieutenant-General of Castile, is dressed in red with the usual garnish of gold with lace and satins. His face is innocent but grave beyond his years, as in the foreground he holds a magpie on a string, the latter bearing a brush with Goya's signature in its beak. Three cats crouch behind them, eyeing the bird covetously, and on the child's left stands a cage full of goldfinches. The iconology of the period suggests that the cats may be either symbols of liberty or of wicked cunning; the goldfinches represent Christianity, and the magpie persecution and premature death. As this remarkable concept could scarcely have taken shape without the assent of the parents, it is tempting to wonder what ambitions they cherished for a son destined by tradition for arms or the Church.

The exhibition continues until the end of March.