Portrait of Martín Zapater

Goya and Martin Zapater met as schoolboys in Zaragoza and stayed close for the rest of their lives, mostly by letter. Well over a hundred of those letters survive, full of jokes, money worries and gossip, and they are the main reason we know what Goya was like as a man rather than as a court painter. He made this portrait in 1797 and wrote the friendship straight onto it, signing along the bottom, to his friend Martin Zapater. By then Goya had lost his hearing to a severe illness a few years earlier, which had turned him toward the darker, stranger work of his middle years. Against that, this picture is warm and direct: an ordinary, slightly heavy man in a dark coat, looked at by someone who had known him since boyhood.