Portrait of Carlos López Altamirano

By 1796 Goya had been deaf for about three years, ever since an illness nearly killed him and shut him out of sound. He kept working, and some of his sharpest pictures from these years are of friends, painted plainly and without flattery. This is one of them. Carlos Lopez Altamirano was a judge on the high court in Seville and one of Spain's reform-minded men of the Enlightenment, a circle Goya moved in just as the Spanish crown was growing nervous about French ideas crossing the border. Goya set him against nothing at all, a bare ground and an oval frame, his hair unkempt, his eyes fixed on us. Along the canvas runs the reason it exists, written in Goya's own words: to his friend Altamirano, judge of Seville.