Porträt des Herzogs von Roca

Goya painted this in 1795, a hard year to be Spanish. That summer the country signed the Peace of Basel and pulled out of two years of war against revolutionary France, its army battered along the Pyrenees. His sitter, Vicente María de Vera, Duke of La Roca, wears the uniform of that royal army, with the sash of the Order of Carlos III across his chest and the small emblem of the Golden Fleece at his throat. The portrait was likely made to mark his election to lead the Royal Academy of History. Goya himself had turned inward by now. A severe illness two years earlier had left him completely deaf, and he studied faces harder than ever. Notice the heavy-lidded eyes, watchful and a little weary, that he gives this well-decorated man.