General Nicolas Philippe Guye

Goya painted this in 1810, with French troops occupying Spain and Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon's brother, installed on the Spanish throne. General Guye was one of the occupiers, governor of Seville, and he was also one of Goya's paying patrons, so the painter grants him every dignity, the medals, the steady gaze of a man of state. What makes it strange is what Goya was doing at the same time in private. In those very years he was etching the Disasters of War, his unsparing record of the atrocities French soldiers committed in Spain. He kept both truths going at once. The portrait later passed to the general's brother and is now in Richmond, Virginia.