Portrait of Francisco Cabarrús

Goya finished this portrait in 1788, and the bank that commissioned it paid him 4,500 reales that April. The sitter was no duke or general. Francisco Cabarrús was a financier, French-born, who had talked the Spanish crown into founding its first national bank a few years earlier. That alone made the picture unusual. In Spain a full-length standing portrait like this was almost always reserved for aristocrats, and Goya lends its grandeur to a man of money instead. He dresses him in pale green silk shot with gold, catching the light, a colour long tied to wealth. Within a couple of years Cabarrús would be jailed on charges tied to his finances, and later still would serve as a minister under Napoleon's brother in Spain.