Portrait de Louis d'Étrurie

Goya painted this head around 1800, when he was court painter in Madrid and gathering the royal relatives for his great group portrait, The Family of Charles the Fourth. The young man is Louis of Bourbon-Parma, married to the king's daughter. Within a year Napoleon would invent a throne for him, carving the old grand duchy of Tuscany into a brand-new Kingdom of Etruria and installing the couple as its rulers. It was a paper kingdom that lasted only a few years, and Louis himself was dead by 1803, at 29. Goya works fast and plainly here, more interested in the soft, slightly anxious face than in any royal dignity. Studies like this fed straight into the finished family group that now hangs a few rooms away in the Prado.