Autoritratto su lino

By the time Goya painted this small self-portrait, in the mid-1790s, he had already lost his hearing. A violent illness in 1793 left him permanently deaf, and it pushed his work somewhere darker and more inward. In these same years he was bent over copper plates, etching Los Caprichos, his series of biting prints about superstition, vanity, and the follies of Spanish society. Look at the spectacles he is wearing. Those are the close-work glasses he used for the fine labor of engraving. He was first painter to the king by now, yet he has set himself down on a scrap of linen barely the size of a hand, in the plain glasses he worked his plates in.