Ritratto di Vicente Joaquín Osorio de Moscoso

In 1786 Spain had just founded its first national bank, the Banco de San Carlos, and its directors wanted their boardroom lined with portraits of themselves. Goya, not yet the court's leading painter, took the commission. This sitter ran the bank. Vicente Joaquín Osorio de Moscoso, Count of Altamira, was a Grandee of Spain many times over and, by one English visitor's account, the smallest man he had ever met in polite society. Goya gives him the full apparatus of rank, the sash and the table of state papers, and lets the small, composed figure carry all of it. The bank paid him 10,000 reales for this and two companion portraits. Altamira was pleased enough to hand Goya his whole family next, including the boy Manuel in red with his pet magpie.