The embroiderer Juan López de Robredo

By 1795 Goya was one of the leading painters at the Spanish court, and an illness a couple of years earlier had left him completely deaf. Here, though, he turns not to a duke or a queen but to a craftsman, Juan López de Robredo, who had inherited the post of embroiderer to the royal household from his father. Robredo holds up an embroidery pattern, its design the same one court embroiderers wore on their own uniforms, a quiet advertisement of his trade. The soft, slightly hazy modelling is typical of Goya before 1800. For years the man was misidentified as someone else entirely, an Italian decorator at the palace, until the sitter was correctly named.