Autorretrato com o Dr. Arrieta

At the end of 1819 Goya, then 73 and living outside Madrid, fell gravely ill and expected to die. The doctor who pulled him through was Eugenio García Arrieta, and this is Goya's thank-you. He paints himself gray and slack, sinking back into the bedclothes, while Arrieta leans in from behind and holds a glass of medicine to his lips, one arm around him. Along the bottom Goya wrote it out plainly, that he gives thanks to his friend Arrieta for the skill with which he saved his life. The format copies the ex-voto, the little votive panel a Spaniard would hang in church after surviving a calamity, except Goya gives the thanks not to a saint but to his physician. He lived another eight years after this.