Bildnis des Juan Bautista de Muguiro

Goya painted this in Bordeaux in May 1827, and he was 81 years old. He had left Spain for good a few years earlier, an old liberal who no longer felt safe under the restored absolutist king Ferdinand VII, and he lived out his last years among fellow Spanish exiles in the French city. Muguiro was a banker with distant family ties to the painter. He is shown seated, caught reading a letter he has just opened, papers spread across the desk beside a green and gold porcelain inkwell. The palette is dark and pared right down, the background bare. Goya died the following April, which makes this one of the very last portraits he ever signed.