Portrait of Bartolomé Sureda y Miserol

The relaxed young man leaning here, hat in hand, was no aristocrat but an engineer. Bartolomé Sureda had been sent to England to learn cotton-spinning and to France for the secrets of Sèvres porcelain, and by 1804 he was running the Spanish royal porcelain works at Buen Retiro in Madrid. He was also Goya's friend, which is why the pose is so informal, with none of the stiffness of a court commission. And Sureda gave something back. He taught Goya aquatint, the printmaking method built on soft washes of tone rather than lines, which Goya would use for the dark, biting prints of his later years. Goya painted Sureda's wife Teresa as a companion piece, and the two portraits have long hung together.