Vicente López Portaña

In 1826 an 80-year-old Francisco Goya, deaf and living out his last years in Bordeaux, came back to Madrid and sat for a portrait. The painter facing him was Vicente López Portaña, the man who had inherited Goya's old post as First Court Painter to the Spanish crown. The result became the best-known image of Goya's old age: a rumpled man in a dark coat, sharp-eyed, worn but unbroken.

López had come up the orderly way Goya never did, a scholarship boy from Valencia trained at the royal academy in Madrid, all polish and precision. He served Ferdinand VII, the restored and reactionary king, as official portraitist, and over a long career he painted nearly everyone of consequence in Spain in the first half of the 1800s.

His smooth Neoclassical finish was already going out of fashion in his own lifetime, as Romanticism loosened Spanish painting. Yet it was that cool, exact eye that fixed the aged Goya for good. López outlived his famous sitter by more than twenty years and died in Madrid in 1850.