Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Maler, Erfinder
Francisco Lezcano, "Das Kind aus Vallecas" - Vorzeichnung für eine nicht ausgeführte Radierung nach Velázquez, 1778 - 1779; vor 1792
This is a preliminary drawing for Francisco de Goya's etching after Diego Velázquez's painting in the Museo Nacional del Prado[1] that remains unpublished. The only known proof of this engraving was in Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos's collection in Gijón until it disappeared during the Spanish Civil War.[2] In the first edition of his Hamburg collection catalogue, Alfonso Pérez Sánchez published a photograph of that proof. The poor quality of the image impedes determining its technique with any degree of certainty, but comparison with other unpublished works from this series, such as Don Juan de Austria or Ochoa or Mayor Ronquillo, suggests it may have been a proof printed in red using etching and aquatint, before lettering but with an inscription in ink at the bottom.
In his first set of etchings after Velázquez paintings, which were published in July 1778, Goya had already included the portraits of the seated dwarfs Sebastián de Morra and Don Diego de Acedo, El Primo. With his Child from Vallecas, he now produced a third.
The drawing was executed in red chalk over a light preliminary drawing in graphite, which is still visible on the subject's right foot and hands. It is the only work from this series of Goya drawings after paintings by Velázquez without inscriptions identifying the two artists. The drawing shows signs of having been transferred to a copper plate through pressure applied when both the plate and the paper were fed through a press: on one hand, the double mark, in ink and in relief, of the edge of the plate, and on the other, numerous creases in the paper produced when the drawing was dampened. This system allowed the drawn image to be engraved in reverse on the plate, so that subsequent prints maintained the original orientation of the drawing.
As in the previous drawings, here Goya reduced everything not directly related to the figure: the landscape on the right is restricted to barely differentiated horizontal structures and Velázquez's chiaroscuro has been eliminated. Only the sky remains lighter and is recognized as such in the drawing. The tree at Francisco Lezcano's back, which is difficult to make out in Velázquez's work and whatever he is sitting on are in no way more clearly defined. The hat in the foreground of the painting has wholly disappeared. In the Goya drawing, “El niño” sits upon and in front of surfaces abstracted from the original. Goya's primarily graphic thinking is most apparent in the altered light-dark relationships and the line along the left silhouette of Lezcano's body. The soft white collar, which is completely backed by the darkness of the tree in the Velázquez, is distinctly associated with the light sky on the right, in that the line of the background plane is shifted closer to the center of the drawing, producing a kind of cross at which four different levels of brightness converge. Goya does something similar at the transition from the doublet to the left sleeve of the figure's shirt, where the line continues to the right as the horizon. With these graphic techniques, Goya focuses all attention on the person portrayed.
Jens Hoffmann-Samland
1 Oil on canvas, 42 1/8 x 32 3/8 in. (107 x 83 cm), 1636-38, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, inv. no. P 1204.
2 Pérez Sánchez 1969, no. 383.