Portrait of the Poet Moratín

In 1824 Goya, nearly 80 and half deaf, left Spain and settled in Bordeaux, where a community of Spanish liberals had gone into exile after the king's absolutist crackdown. Among them was his old friend the playwright Leandro Fernandez de Moratin, whom Goya had first painted a quarter-century earlier. This second portrait is a plainer, quieter thing, Moratin seated at a table in a dressing gown, his hand poised to write, the head turned with a withdrawn, melancholy look. On the papers under his arm Goya slipped in his own signature, painted in reverse. Both men were near the end. Goya died in Bordeaux in the spring of 1828, and Moratin followed him a few months later.