Juan Antonio Meléndez Valdés

Goya painted this in 1797 and signed it as a gift to a friend, the poet and judge Juan Antonio Melendez Valdes. The two men moved in the same circle of Spanish reformers, the ilustrados, who hoped Enlightenment ideas could remake the country from inside the court. The year had gone well for the sitter, his collected poems came out in the spring and he took up a magistrate's post in Madrid in the autumn. The optimism did not hold. When French armies later put Napoleon's brother on the Spanish throne, Melendez Valdes backed the new regime, and when it collapsed he had to flee. He died in exile in France in 1817. Goya inscribed the canvas plainly, painter to his friend.