Portrait of Manuel Godoy

In the spring of 1801 Spain sent an army into Portugal, and the whole campaign was over in about three weeks. It became known as the War of the Oranges, after the branches Spanish soldiers picked near Elvas and sent back to the queen. The man who ran it was Manuel Godoy, the queen's favourite and the most powerful minister in Spain, and this is how he wanted to be remembered. Goya shows him sprawled on the battlefield in his general's uniform, a captured Portuguese standard leaning at his side and dispatches in his hand. The two men were friends, and Godoy owned other paintings by Goya. Yet look at the lazy, self-satisfied pose and it is hard not to read a little mockery in it. Within seven years Godoy would be driven out of Spain for good.