Reiterbildnis Ferdinands VII.

This is a portrait of a king who was hardly there. The Academy of San Fernando commissioned it in March 1808, days after Ferdinand VII took the Spanish throne from his own father. Goya asked the new king to sit, and Ferdinand gave him three-quarters of an hour, twice, and no more, because within weeks Napoleon had lured him across the border and would hold him in France for six years. So Goya built this grand equestrian image, the king mounted and in command, from barely an hour and a half of looking at the real man. He delivered it that November, by which time Spain was already at war with the French troops occupying Madrid.