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 what had become one of the more backward countries of Western Europe.
The paintings of two of Spain’s leading reformers are hung alongside one another in the exhibition, which enables the viewer to see how skillfully Goya brings out the differences between them in character and in the roles they played in Spanish affairs. Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos(1798) portrays a man who was an author and philosopher as well as an important proponent of land reform. He was now the Minister of Justice, but he had been out of office for the previous seven years, which had given him time to write and think. That is what he is doing here. He sits