Le Trépas de saint Joseph

In June 1787 Goya wrote to his friend Martin Zapater with a familiar kind of panic. He had three large altar paintings to deliver for Saint Anne's day in late July, life-size figures, and he had not yet begun. The commission had come down from Charles III himself, arranged by the royal architect who was rebuilding a convent church in Valladolid for Cistercian nuns. This is one of the three. It shows the death of Saint Joseph, the moment Christian tradition calls his transit, as he passes away attended by Christ and the Virgin. Goya was 41 and rising fast at court, not yet the painter of nightmares he would become after illness took his hearing. The paintings went up when the church was consecrated that October, late, as these things usually were.