Small pictures are special. Intimate, often reticent, they demand that we pay strict attention to what happens within their circumscribed boundaries, but in recompense, they allow us to approach them closely and, when they are illusionistic, to enter a magical miniaturized universe at once like and unlike our everyday, actual-size world. The works in the current exhibition “Goya: Truth and Fantasy, The Small Paintings” offer such pleasures in abundance, but even more important, they permit us to see the Spanish master at his most private.¹ Drawn from Goya’s entire career, they range from early conceptions of commissioned pictures better known in their large, public, finished versions to eccentric little paintings done to please no one but the artist himself, from ingratiating miniature portraits of family members to tiny but ferocious works on ivory, like portable versions of the celebrated black frescos.

Such a “privileged” view of Goya is especially engaging, since he is notoriously elusive and hard to categorize. There’s even some question about which century to assign him to; the Metropolitan, for example, after years of presenting Goya in its nineteenth-century galleries, as a precursor of Courbet and Manet, recently decided that he is an eighteenth-century painter and relocated its holdings. It’s not, however, pure caprice. Goya’s working lifespan stretched from the most frivolous moments of the Rococo to full-blown Romanticism. Remarkably long-lived despite bouts of a debilitating illness that destroyed his hearing, he was born in 1746 and died in 1828. Only six years younger