La Dernière Communion de saint Joseph de Calasanz

Goya painted this in 1819, at 73, for the church of the Piarist order in Madrid, the Escuelas Pias. It was the same order of teaching priests who ran the free school he had attended as a boy in Zaragoza. Jose de Calasanz, the Spanish priest shown here receiving his last communion, had founded those schools centuries earlier to teach poor children for nothing. Goya asked only a modest fee and then, the story goes, returned most of it as a gift. He made the picture during a hard stretch, soon before a grave illness and the dark private works now called the Black Paintings. The mood here is the opposite of those, quiet and devout, an old man kneeling in shadow with the light gathered on his face.