Portrait of a Man in a Brown Coat

In February 1910 the Museum of Fine Arts had been in its new building on Huntington Avenue for only a few months, and a Boston collector, Henrietta Fitz, wrote to the director offering, in her words, the portrait by Goya now on exhibition at the Kimball Gallery on Arlington Street. The museum accepted, and the picture has been in Boston ever since. Nobody knows who the sitter is. He sits upright in an armchair, in a dark brown coat over a white shirt trimmed with gold, against a plain dark background. Both his hands are tucked inside the coat. One explanation, offered in the Goya catalogue of the Fundación Goya en Aragón, is that hands added to the price of a portrait. The canvas is dated to around 1797 to 1800, and the standard catalogues of his work accept it as his.