José Queraltó

By 1802 Goya was first painter to the Spanish king and could largely pick his sitters, and here he chose a doctor. Jose Queralto was a military physician who had risen to lead the Royal College of Surgery of San Carlos in Madrid, one of the men modernising Spanish medicine. Goya shows him seated in his dark uniform against a plain background, no props, all the attention on the face and the steady, level look. The inscription is unusual. It is written as if in the sitter's own hand, dedicating the portrait and naming Goya as the painter, dated 1802. The picture stayed with the doctor's own family in Madrid for almost a hundred years, until 1900, before it began the journey that carried it to Munich.