There have been many exhibitions devoted to the great Spanish artist Francisco de Goya (1746–1828), but the show at Britain’s National Gallery is the first to concentrate on his portraits. The portraits display all the technical mastery of light and color, of detail and texture that characterizes Goya’s other work but also have that supreme gift of the modern portraitist: an insight into the character and preoccupations of the sitter.

The curators have sensibly grouped the portraits in relation to Goya’s close but changing relationship with the Spanish social order. Goya’s portraits, other than the personal ones of friends and family and indeed himself, can only be understood in relation to the political history of that country. Goya was particularly concerned to paint sympathetically the eighteenth-century reformers seeking to modernize and enlighten...

 

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