Ritratto di Félix de Azara

The shelves behind this man are crowded with stuffed birds and animals, and they are the point of the portrait. Felix de Azara was a Spanish army engineer who spent 21 years in what is now Paraguay and the River Plate, sent to survey a colonial border and staying on to become one of the first people to catalogue the wildlife of that part of South America. Goya, a fellow Aragonese, painted him in 1805 back in Spain, in a naval brigadier's uniform with bright yellow breeches, a note in his hand carrying the date and both their names. Azara's careful field observations of how species varied would be read, decades later, by a young Charles Darwin.