Portrait of Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez

Goya painted this in 1785, when he was still climbing and needed friends in the right places. The sitter, Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez, was one of them, an art historian and civil servant who, a few years earlier, had helped steer portrait commissions from the new national bank of San Carlos toward Goya. Goya shows him plainly, a thoughtful man of letters in the sober dress of an Enlightenment official, not a grandee. The two belonged to the same circle of reform-minded scholars gathered around the statesman Jovellanos. In 1800 Ceán would publish the first serious dictionary of Spanish artists, six volumes that stayed the standard reference for generations.