Over the course of his long career, Goya moved from jolly and lighthearted to deeply pessimistic and searching in his paintings, drawings, etchings, and frescoes.

During his eighty-two years of life, Francisco José Goya y Lucientes drew and painted for about seventy, etched for some fifty, and made lithographs for five or ten. Each mode of expression carried his fame differently to different countries. In Spain his paintings made him widely known before he was forty, while his etchings fell flat. When he was seventy-nine some of his prints were copied in Paris, and his big lithographs were admired there shortly after his death in 1828. His drawings have been the revelation of the last half-century.

Ever since its arrival at the Metropolitan as part of the outstanding collection of Old Master paintings bequeathed by New York financier and philanthropist Jules Bache, Goya's portrait of Don Manuel Osorio, the three- or four-year-old son of the conde de Altamira, has ranked as one of the museum's most popular paintings In celebration of the reinstallation of the Metropolitan's European Paintings galleries, inaugurated last May, the condesa de Altamira and her son have been temporarily reunited in a gallery devoted to Goya and his contemporaries in Spain. But from the outset this move was planned as just the first stage of a more eventful family reunion that would also include Don Manuel's older brother, Vicente Osorio, and their father, Vicente Joaquín Osorio de Moscoso y Guzmán, conde de Altamira: all four pictures outstanding works by Goya.

Goya’s drawing and prints reveal much more about the artist than his celebrated paintings.

Exhibition curator Mark McDonald takes us on a tour of [_Goya’s Graphic Imagination_](/exhibitions/listings/2020/goyas-graphic-imagination).

The Met’s greatest Old Master paintings are back on view in a series of provocative galleries that introduce fresh themes and narratives about European art.