Ritratto di Mariano Goya

In the years Goya painted this, Spain was at war. French troops under Napoleon held Madrid, famine emptied the city in the winter of 1811 to 1812, and in private Goya was etching the plates he called the Disasters of War, scenes of killing he never dared publish in his lifetime. This is the other Goya. Mariano was his only grandson, the child of his son Javier, and the old painter was plainly devoted to him, portraying the boy more than once over these years and always with unusual tenderness. Here Mariano is still small and finely dressed, with nothing of the war anywhere near him. Goya would paint him a last time as a grown man, in the final years of his own life across the border in Bordeaux.