La Mort de saint François Xavier

Goya painted this around 1771, not long after coming home to Aragon from a study trip to Italy. He was in his mid-twenties and still years away from the royal court in Madrid, taking devotional commissions in and around Zaragoza. The saint is Francis Xavier, the Jesuit missionary who died in 1552 on a small island off the coast of China, within sight of a country he never managed to reach. Goya splits the picture into an earthly deathbed below and an opening of light above, an idea he took from a drawing he had studied under the local painter Jose Luzan. The canvas stayed in the family. The museum in Zaragoza bought it in 1926 from a descendant of the painter's uncle.