Ritratto di Francisco Bayeu

In 1786 Goya was finally named painter to the king, and the man who had helped make that happen was his brother-in-law, Francisco Bayeu, an established court painter under whom Goya had once trained. The two had grown apart over the years, and this portrait reads partly as a gesture of thanks. Bayeu stands before a blank canvas in flamboyant black finery, a white frilled shirt at his throat and a brush in his carefully rendered right hand. Goya kept almost the whole picture in greys and blacks, letting the whites at the collar and cuffs carry the light. Bayeu was about 52 here, and would outlive this reconciliation by only nine years.