An artist’s late works can show us how lifelong passions overcome physical limitations. The weakening of the body will lead, at times in inverse proportion, to a strengthening and freeing of the spirit, as illness and immobility are transformed into artistic virtues.

This certainly isn’t always the case – Willem de Kooning, whose work degenerated with his health, immediately comes to mind. But in the last works of some of the greatest talents we sense a miraculous marshalling of forces. Matisse, bedridden, created the Vence Chapel almost entirely out of paper cutouts; Renoir, with brushes tied to his arthritic hands, painted some of the most sensuous nudes of the 20th century.

Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) was such a talent. A stunning, intimate exhibition at the Frick Collection of more than 50 of the artist’s late works (oils, drawings, prints, and miniature paintings on ivory) demonstrates Goya’s increasing genius and breadth during the last four years of his life.

An illness in 1792 left Goya partly paralyzed and permanently deaf; two more illnesses, in 1819 and 1825, respectively, nearly killed him. “Goya’s Last Works” is comprised almost entirely of works completed between 1824 and 1828, while Goya, in increasingly frail health, was in voluntary exile in Bordeaux. The exhibition is built around the Frick’s spectacular painting “Portrait of a Lady (Maria Martinez de Puga?)” (1824). The portrait – a loose, washy work in which her fully formed, pearly pink face, set off by her black dress, shines from out of a greenish-gray dark – prefigures and outdoes Manet.

In 1824, when Goya, at age 78, moved to France from his native Spain, he had already had a prolific, rollercoaster career as an artist. A liberal and a rebel, he had more than once only narrowly escaped political prosecution. Goya came of age during the Enlightenment and he made the most of it. Possibly more than any other artist, he explored the full range of human frailty, futility, and folly.

Goya, influenced by Tiepolo, Velazquez, and Rembrandt, designed Baroque tapestries and painted religious subjects as well as royal and, later, middleclass portraits. He was an extremely popular artist, and served as director at the Royal Academy in Madrid and court painter to Kings Charles III, Charles IV, and Ferdinand VII.

A major influence on Delacroix, Manet, Redon, and Picasso, as well as on the Realists, Impressionists, and Surrealists, Goya was as fiery as Turner and as satirically biting as Daumier. His monumental painting “The Family of Charles IV” (1800), a psychologically revealing and physically unflattering portrait, is often considered to be one of the first Modern paintings. Equally a revolutionary and a traditionalist; a Romanticist and a Classicist; a Realist and a Surrealist, Goya was an artist far ahead of, and completely grounded in, his time.

Before Goya moved to France, he painted the “Majas” (1800-01), beautifully mysterious pictures of prostitutes, and produced the “Caprichos” (1799), a profound, fantastical, and mocking series of 80 satirical etchings that may have led, around 1800, to his falling out of royal favor.After the Spanish uprising following Napoleon’s military occupation of Spain in 1808, he painted “The Second of May 1808” and “The Third of May 1808” (both 1814), the groundbreaking political works about the Spanish uprising and its suppression; the sobering series of 82 etchings “The Disasters of War” (1810-13); “Los Proverbios” (1818), a series of nightmarish etchings based on proverbs and superstitions; and the mythic and surreal painting “The Colossus” (1812). He also produced self-portraits of striking clarity, as well as the series of 14 large “Black” paintings (1820-23), a deeply moving and dark group of works that includes “Saturn.”

In the last years of his life, Goya worked on a smaller scale and more intimately but no less imaginatively. “Goya’s Last Works” shows a range of approach to subject and materials that demonstrates the artist’s assuredness and inventiveness.The exhibition begins with a gallery of self-portraits and portraits on paper and in oil on canvas, some of which the artist completed before he left for Bordeaux. “Self-Portrait With Three-Cornered Hat” (c. 1780-92), a drawing in pen and brown ink, is riveting for its shift from the face’s stippled airiness to a dense torrent of lines in the hat, hair, and coat. “Self-Portrait After Illness of 1792-93” (c. 1795-97), a piercing, head-on countenance in brush and gray wash on paper, erupts on the page like a lion’s roar.

Painted after his illness of 1819, “Self-Portrait With Dr. Arrieta” (1820), on loan from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, is the largest work on view. The painting, a Pieta-like grouping, depicts the physician standing behind Goya, cradling the feeble artist in his arms and administering medicine to him. A dark apparition – a devil or a priest – looms in the blackness.The portrait is a moving, pared-down work, almost allegorical for its frontal, frieze-like presentation of essential narrative elements.

What is surprising in the room of portraits is how differently Goya treated his sitters, as if each demanded a particular paint handling. Here we see an artist serving his sitters, rather than sitters serving an artistic style. “Leonardo Fernandez de Moratin” (1824), of the poet and playwright, and “Manuel Silvela” (1824-27) are as luminous and solid as portraits by Corot. “Milkmaid of Bordeaux” (c. 1827) is broad and translucent in areas that recall late Titian.”Don Tiburico Perez y Cuervo, the Architect” (1820), in blacks, whites, grays, and greens, is reminiscent of Courbet: The figure is distant, as if on a mountaintop, yet he glows forward and rises like a monument out of the darkness.

The second gallery at the Frick is filled with a selection of two dozen spectacular black crayon drawings from two Bordeaux albums. Ambiguous, satirical, and fantastical vignettes of religious processions, witches, majas, lunatics, lovers, devils, a flying dog, and a giantess, they are sketchy, full works that are as graceful as they are cutting and precise.

At the center of the gallery is a vitrine of 10 miniature paintings of figures on thin pieces of ivory. Culled from 40 works Goya completed in the winter of 1824-25, they are fluid, magical wash drawings in cool blues, blacks, whites, browns, and grays that hover somewhere between grisailles and Picasso’s blue period. They were begun with accidental washes in which Goya would divine images. All of them glow as if lit by the moon. Some of them look like cameos from hell. “Judith and Holofernes,” in which Judith saws off Holofernes’s head with a bloody sword, is as silvery as a work by El Greco.

Upstairs, flanking the magnificent painting “Bullfighting Scene, Known as Suerte de Varas” (1824), are the “Bordeaux Lithographs.” Lithography was invented at the end of the 18th century, and Goya transformed what had been a very tight medium into something more akin to drawing.On view at the Frick are four feisty, loose bullfighting scenes that, tumbling and rolling, look more like drypoint prints or pen and ink drawings.

“Goya’s Last Works,” the first show of its kind in the United States, is an informative, rich, and varied exhibition. Co-curated by Jonathan Brown and Susan Grace Galassi, it presents us with an intimate last glimpse of one of the titans of art – a painter, printmaker, commentator, and storyteller whose passion and inventiveness, despite numerous setbacks, burned bright to the end.

lesplund@nysun.com

Until May 14 (1 E. 70th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, 212-288-0700).