José Luis Munárriz

Goya signed and dated this in 1815, the year his sitter's life changed direction. José Luis Munárriz had been secretary of Madrid's Royal Academy of Fine Arts and a man of letters, a translator who had brought Scottish essays on rhetoric into Spanish. That year Ferdinand VII named him director of the Royal Company of the Philippines, and he left the academy. Goya, his friend, surrounds him with the tools of the old life: beside a copy of Don Quixote sit Virgil, Petrarch and Camões. Goya was nearly 70, deaf, and worn down by war and illness, and it shows in the sober, slightly melancholy way he lets his friend sit among his books.