Archbishop Joaquin Company

In August 1800 Joaquín Company, a Franciscan friar who had governed the archdiocese of Zaragoza for three years, was named Archbishop of Valencia. Zaragoza kept a gallery of portraits of its archbishops in the Archbishop's Palace, and Company commissioned his place in it from Goya, who had been made First Court Painter to Charles IV only the autumn before. The sittings seem to have taken place in Madrid, where a small study of the head, now in the Prado, was painted first. The finished canvas then went to Zaragoza. Company stands full length against an almost empty dark ground, with his family coat of arms in the upper right corner and a long painted inscription recording his appointments. The folded paper in his raised right hand carries a single word, Goya. The portrait still hangs in the same palace, now the Alma Mater Museum.