Portrait of Francisco del Mazo

Goya painted this friend around 1817, in the strained years after the French had been driven out of Spain and Ferdinand VII had clamped an absolute monarchy back over the country. Francisco del Mazo moved in Goya's circle in Madrid, and the painter, by now in his seventies and stone deaf, gives him no flattery — a broad flattened nose, heavy brow, thick black hair, and a fashionable high-collared English coat of the sort that came in once Napoleon was gone. The likeness left Spain in the 19th century, when the French painter Marcel Briguiboul bought it in Madrid; his son bequeathed it to the museum at Castres, in southern France, in the 1890s.