Bildnis des Juan Antonio Cuervo

Goya painted this in 1819, the year a grave illness nearly killed him. He recovered and made a famous picture of his own doctor holding him upright in bed. The sitter here, Juan Antonio Cuervo, was an architect and the director of the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, and the two men were friends. He wears the red and gold braid of the Academy and holds a rolled plan for his recent rebuilding of the city's Church of Santiago. Goya presents him not as a grandee but as a working intellectual, alert and modern. The dark ground gives nothing away except the pale drawing resting in his hand.