Portrait of Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos

In the spring of 1798 Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos had just been made a minister of the Spanish crown, and Goya painted him in that moment of success looking anything but triumphant. Jovellanos was the leading mind of the Spanish Enlightenment, a reformer who argued for freer trade and land reform at exactly the point when the French Revolution had made such ideas dangerous in Spain. Goya seats him at his desk, papers scattered, head resting on one hand in the old pose of Melancholy. Friends called him Jovino, the melancholy one. Within a year he was dismissed from office, and a few years after that he was shut away without trial for nearly seven years.