Retrato de Francisco Javier de Larumbe

This is another of the portraits Goya made for the Banco de San Carlos, Spain's first national bank, which through the late 1780s was hanging likenesses of its officers in its Madrid headquarters. The sitter, Francisco Javier de Larumbe, was a war commissioner and an honorary director of the bank, and he wears the sash of the Order of Charles III. The bank's ledgers are precise about it. On 15 October 1787 Goya was paid 2,200 reales for the work. What lifts it above a routine job is the face. Goya gives Larumbe a distant, inward look, a man turned slightly aside and caught mid-thought rather than posing. He painted it two years before the king promoted him to chamber painter, the post at the heart of court art.