Antonio Adán de Yarza

Goya painted this young man in Madrid around 1787, near the time of his wedding. Antonio Adán de Yarza was a Basque aristocrat from Lekeitio, on the coast of Biscay, and the finished portrait was carried north in 1794 to hang in his family's palace, where it stayed, quietly, for almost 150 years. Then history reached it. In 1936, with the Spanish Civil War closing on the Basque Country, the regional government took the painting for safekeeping and, in 1937, sent it to Paris for the Spanish Pavilion at the World's Fair, the same room where Picasso's Guernica hung. After that it vanished. For half a century no one could say where it was, until specialists were quietly allowed to examine it in the 1990s. It was shown to the public for the first time in 2019, in Bilbao.