Colección Banco de España

In the late 1890s six portraits turned up in a back room of the Bank of Spain, which then had its headquarters on Calle Atocha in Madrid. Francisco Belda, Marquis of Cabra, recognised them as the work of Francisco de Goya. When specialists doubted him, he went through the surviving archives of the Banco de San Carlos, the bank founded in 1782 from which the Bank of Spain descends, and found the commissions and the payments written into its ledgers.

The six canvases, painted between 1785 and 1788, show King Charles III and the bank's early directors. One of them is Miguel Fernández Durán, Marquis of Tolosa, a director of the bank and a steward at the royal court. A receipt of January 1787 records Goya being paid for this portrait together with those of the king and the Count of Altamira.

Today the Goyas are the heart of a collection of more than 4,000 paintings, sculptures and photographs, from Sorolla and Picasso to living artists. They hang in the bank's headquarters at Cibeles, a building opened in 1891, and can be seen on free guided tours on some weekday afternoons, which also take in the Carrara marble staircase and its stained-glass window from the Mayer workshop in Munich.