Portrait of the Duke of Osuna

In 1785 Goya was still on his way up in Madrid, a provincial painter working toward the royal court and not yet the famous name he would become. The Duke of Osuna and his wife were among the first grandees to take him seriously, and they kept commissioning him for the next 20 years. Don Pedro Téllez-Girón was one of the most cultivated aristocrats in Spain, an army officer with Enlightenment tastes, and Goya gives him that ease: a slight, elegant figure in restrained dress, built up from the thin silvery greys he loved. Osuna would die in 1807, the year before Napoleon's armies marched into Spain and the world Goya painted here began to come apart.