El actor Isidoro Máiquez

Goya painted this in 1807, and the sitter was the most famous actor in Spain. Isidoro Máiquez had trained in Paris with the great French tragedian Talma and brought a more natural, less declaimed style of acting back to the Madrid stage, scoring a huge hit as Shakespeare's Othello. Goya gives him almost nothing to lean on, just a chair and a dark ground, the whole force of the picture in the man's steady, slightly wary gaze. The paint is laid on thick and fast, close to the raw handling of Goya's last, darkest years. And those years were near. The next spring, in 1808, Napoleon's army marched into Spain, and the war that followed would fill Goya's work with far grimmer faces than this confident one.