Portrait of José Pío de Molina

This may be the last portrait Goya ever painted. In his late seventies, deaf, and out of step with the absolute monarchy restored in Spain, he had gone into exile in Bordeaux, in France, where a small circle of fellow Spanish liberals had gathered. Jose Pio de Molina was one of them, a friend who had briefly been mayor of Madrid under the short-lived liberal constitution. Goya died in 1828 with the picture unfinished. You can see that most in the clothes, which dissolve into a few rough swipes of paint, while the face is carried much further. The handling is so loose and so free that it looks less like the 1820s than like something painted decades afterward. He was 82 when he died, and still painting like this.