Portrait of Ramón Pignatelli

The man in this portrait spent much of his life on a canal. Ramon Pignatelli was a Zaragoza churchman, but his real work was pushing through the Imperial Canal of Aragon, a vast waterway meant to irrigate the dry plains around the city and carry boats inland. Around 1790 the canal's board commissioned Goya, himself an Aragonese from a village not far off, to paint the man who had driven it forward. He shows Pignatelli full length in his clerical black, calm and assured, every bit the administrator of a great public project. Pignatelli died only three years later, in 1793, with the canal still unfinished.