フランシスコ・カバルスの肖像

Goya finished this portrait in 1788, and the bank that commissioned it paid him 4,500 reales that April. The sitter was no duke or general. Francisco Cabarrús was a financier, French-born, who had talked the Spanish crown into founding its first national bank a few years earlier. That alone made the picture unusual. In Spain a full-length standing portrait like this was almost always reserved for aristocrats, and Goya lends its grandeur to a man of money instead. He dresses him in pale green silk shot with gold, catching the light, a colour long tied to wealth. Within a couple of years Cabarrús would be jailed on charges tied to his finances, and later still would serve as a minister under Napoleon's brother in Spain.