Self-portrait on Linen

By the time Goya painted this small self-portrait, in the second half of the 1790s, he had already lost his hearing. A violent illness in 1793 left him permanently deaf, and it pushed his work somewhere darker and more inward. In these same years he was bent over copper plates, etching Los Caprichos, his series of biting prints about superstition, vanity, and the follies of Spanish society. Look at how he shows himself: seated in front of the canvas he is working on, the easel itself outside the picture, his hair short and unpowdered, a boldly patterned kerchief knotted at his throat, his eyes fixed on whoever is standing where his sitter stood. He was painter to the king by now, yet he set himself down on a scrap of unlined linen barely the size of a hand.