Mariano Ferrer y Aulet

Goya painted this portrait around 1780, in the years when he was building a name as a portraitist before his real rise at the royal court. The man is Mariano Ferrer y Aulet, who would soon become secretary of the Royal Academy of San Carlos in Valencia, shown seated in a dark green coat and yellow waistcoat with one arm resting on a table of papers. On those papers Goya placed his own signature, a quiet way of tying himself to the sitter. Ferrer kept the picture for decades and finally gave it to the Valencia academy in 1809, which is how it came to hang in the city's museum of fine arts.