Bildnis des Sebastián Martínez y Pérez

Around the time he painted this, Goya's life changed for good. A severe illness in the early 1790s left him permanently deaf, and he spent months recovering in Cádiz at the house of the man in this portrait, Sebastián Martínez, a wealthy merchant and one of the great print and picture collectors in Spain. They were close. The sheet Martínez holds is inscribed in Goya's own hand, by his friend Goya, 1792. You can see the friendship in the care of it, the shimmer of striped silk and polished buttons brushed on in thin, quick, half-transparent strokes. He recovered enough to return to his work in Madrid, but the deafness never lifted.