Porträt des Juan de Villanueva

The man Goya painted here in 1805 built the walls that now hold Spain's greatest paintings. Juan de Villanueva was the country's leading neoclassical architect, and years earlier Charles III had set him to design a grand building for the study of natural science on the edge of Madrid. War and the king's death stalled it, and when it finally opened, decades on, it did so as a picture gallery, the Prado. Goya shows him old, in the blue coat and red waistcoat of the royal academy he directed, plans spread on the table and one sheet in his hand, as if about to talk you through it. Villanueva died in 1811, before he could see what his building would become.