Ritratto di don Fr. Miguel Fernández y Flores

Goya painted this in 1815, the year the sitter, a friar named Miguel Fernandez Flores, was appointed to a bishopric far away in Quito, in what is now Ecuador. He never took up the post and was redirected to Seville instead, but Goya had already inscribed the grand new title across the canvas. By this date the long war against Napoleon had just ended and Spain was back under a restored and vengeful king, while an ageing Goya kept himself going with portrait commissions like this one. He shows the friar seated in a plain wooden chair, in a blue habit with a white rochet beneath it and a heavy gold cross hanging on his chest.