Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

I thought I might send a few thoughts on Byron and Goya with an eye to interesting members of the International Byron Societies in viewing some of Goya's paintings while at this year's International Byron Conference in Spain. Despite the fact that their backgrounds and lifestyles, as well as the countries they lived in, were so entirely different, studying the paintings of Goya alongside the poetry and prose of Byron reveals deep affinities.

According to Robert Hughes, Goya was a man 'free from humbug and cant, loyal to his friends, loving to his women, and deeply protective of his relatives and dependants, a natural señor with a great appetite for life' and 'an equal talent for living it'. What he hated most was 'hypocrisy'. All this sounds very like Byron, as do Goya's passionate expressions of strong opinions, his 'questioning, irreverent attitude to life' and 'persistent scepticism'.

Both present us with a gallery of beautiful women in their art: compare Byron's Haidee, for example, with Goya's Duchesses of Alba and Osuna and his enchanting young Condesa de Chinchón. Both were similarly critical of religious institutions yet could express genuine religious feeling: Byron claimed to 'abhor religion' but also said 'I revere and love my God'; Goya produced anticlerical prints (especially in the Caprichos series) but also sublimely moving pious works such as St Bernadino of Siena preaching before King Alonso of Aragon (Church of San Francisco el Grande, Madrid) and The Last Communion of St Joseph Calasanz (Prado, Madrid). Yet of all the affinities between Byron and Goya the most striking is in their treatment of war. The war cantos of Don Juan are a perfect example of the Goyan attitude to warfare. According to Hughes, 'Goya was the first painter in modern history to set forth the sober truth about human conflict: that it kills, and kills again, and that its killing obeys urges embedded [...] deeply in the human psyche'. In spite of his poetry on courage, nobility and glory in wars of independence, Byron always shared this horror at the cruelty of warfare, depicted in Goya's The Disasters of War. Even in Canto II of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Byron wrote of war in ways that look forward directly to Goya's The First of May – in Jerome Christensen's words, here we see Byron 'stretch[ing] chivalric motives toward obscene Goya-esque caricature'. In The Siege of Corinth we find a further 'Goyaesque' depiction of war in all its horror.

One can only marvel at the affinities between two men who, as far as we know, never saw each other's work – but I hope this year's Byron conference in Spain will offer Byronists some wonderful opportunities to do precisely that.