La última comunión de San José de Calasanz (1557-1648)

The commission arrived in May 1819 and had to be delivered by 27 August, the saint's feast day. Goya was 73, and the order that asked for the altarpiece, the Piarists, had taught him as a boy in Zaragoza. He seems to have treated the job as a debt. He was offered a substantial fee and handed most of it back. This small panel is the sketch he worked the idea out on first, a handful of figures pulled out of the dark in ochres and greys. The altarpiece itself went to the church of San Anton in Madrid. The sketch stayed in Goya's own house outside Madrid, was listed there in the inventory taken after his death, passed through Paris collections, and ended with the painter Leon Bonnat, who left everything he had collected to his home town of Bayonne.