Portrait of Rafael Esteve i Vilella

By 1815 the long war with Napoleon's France was finally over, Ferdinand VII was back on the Spanish throne, and the court around Goya had turned wary and hard. In that same year the first court painter, then nearly 70, also portrayed the new king. Here he paints someone closer to his own world. Rafael Esteve was a Valencian engraver Goya likely knew through Esteve's cousin, the painter Agustin Esteve, who had worked in his studio. The portrait seems to mark Esteve's appointment as engraver to the court. He sits upright in a yellow chair at a matching desk, one hand at his hip, and in the other he holds the tools of his trade: a burin and the copper plate he is cutting, a finished print laid on the desk. In 1818 Esteve's nephew gave the picture to the Academy of San Carlos in Valencia, where the city's Museum of Fine Arts keeps it still.