Francisco Téllez-Girón, 10th Duke de Osuna

The Osuna family had been Goya's most loyal patrons for nearly thirty years, ever since he painted their family group in 1788. This is the son and heir, sat for in August 1816, in a Spain just emerging from the Napoleonic war under the restored king Ferdinand the Seventh. Goya, by then 70 and long deaf, billed 10,000 reales for the work, and waited until the following spring to be paid, because the duke's finances were already failing. They would collapse entirely within a generation. When the ducal house went bankrupt the portrait was sold off, and it was bought by the French painter Leon Bonnat, whose private collection became the museum in Bayonne where it hangs today.