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." 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." The queen's inane smile (formed by crude dentures), her sagging, pallid skin contrasted with sumptuous gown and jewels, and 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. John Ciofalo wrote 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. ==See also==