Trueba is dishing up a realism that is also lies However that s the modern view isn t it I mean we now know that Trueba got it wrong of course but his contemporaries probably didn t know this And that s immaterial I mean Trueba is saying that realism is the important thing to be doing in art and that s what the second half of the 19th century and the earlier part of the 19th century in some countries was was saying Trueba I think was idealising Goya in his own literary terms that s to say that the conception of realism was something that was important for Trueba and his generation It hadn t been important in the same way for Goya s generation the idea in Goya s time was that you studied reality you studied nature you copied it but not with the object of producing an identical reality in art but reality that was in some sense less specific more generalised in some way universalised was the kind of language that they sometimes used about it