Portrait of a Young Man in Brown, possibly Javier Goya

When the Marqués de Salamanca, a Madrid financier and one of the great collectors of his day, bought this canvas from Goya's own family, it came as a portrait of Manuel García, the celebrated Spanish tenor. It was one of eight pictures given to Goya that his son Javier or his grandson Mariano sold to the marqués, and a wax seal with the Salamanca arms is still on the back of the stretcher. The identity did not hold. Today the young man in brown is thought possibly to be Javier himself, painted around 1810 to 1815. The picture has also collected a signature it never had. In 1924 the German scholar August Mayer wrote that it was signed and dated 1815, while admitting he had not seen the signature, and later authors repeated him, though neither Salamanca catalogue mentions one. The Museum of Fine Arts lists the portrait as attributed to Goya. It came to Boston in 1948 with the bequest of the collector John Taylor Spaulding.