Portrait of Don Ignacio Omulryan y Rourera

In the spring of 1815 Ferdinand VII had been back on the Spanish throne for barely a year, and the Royal Company of the Philippines, the trading company behind Spain's commerce with Asia through Manila, held a general meeting with the king presiding. Its vice-president, Ignacio Omulryan, proposed that Goya record the occasion in a large painting. That group scene now hangs in the Goya museum in Castres, in southern France, and Omulryan sits in it just to the right of the king.

This half-length portrait, dated the same year, repeats him closely: the black coat with its braided red collar and cuffs, the orders on his chest, papers in his hand. The papers carry his full title, minister of the Council and Chamber of the Indies, followed by "by Goya, 1815". Omulryan came from an Irish family on his father's side and a Barcelona one on his mother's, and had been a cavalry officer and head of the postal service before he took that seat on the council in 1810.