Self-Portrait

Goya painted himself in 1815, at 69, in a Spain that had just come through years of war and was not being gentle with survivors. The French had been driven out, Ferdinand VII was back on the throne, and the king's men were busy questioning anyone suspected of serving the occupiers. Goya, who had worked for both sides, had reasons to keep his head down. He shows himself plainly here, no brush, no props, the face lit hard against a dark ground. He had been deaf for more than 20 years by then, since a grave illness in the 1790s, and something of that isolation sits in the guarded, inward look. He kept working another decade, and left Spain for France near the end of his life.