Ritratto di un uomo

Goya painted this seated gentleman around 1806, in the last years before Napoleon's armies poured into Spain and turned his world upside down. The sitter is traditionally identified as Evaristo Perez de Castro, a Spanish diplomat and politician, though the name is a reasonable guess rather than a certainty. What is sure is the confidence of the handling. Goya sets the man against a plain, dim ground with nothing to distract from the face and hands, and dresses him in the sober dark clothes of the early 1800s. The brushwork is quick and economical, the expression alert and a little guarded. It is the work of a painter at the full height of his powers, made in the last quiet years before the French invasion of 1808.