Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos

Goya painted this full-length in the early 1780s, before he was court painter, of a man who would become one of Spain's leading voices of the Enlightenment. Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos was a magistrate, economist and reformer, and Goya shows him relaxed and worldly, legs crossed, hat in hand, leaning on a stick, in the manner of an English gentleman's portrait. The background is not invented. It is the beach at San Lorenzo in Gijon, the northern town Jovellanos came from and had just revisited in 1782 after years away. The two men were friends, and Goya would paint him again years later, greyer and heavier with office. Here he is still young, standing easily on his own coast.