José de Cistué y Coll

Goya painted this full-length portrait in 1788, the year the reforming king Charles III died and Spain passed to his far weaker son. The sitter, José de Cistué y Coll, was an Aragonese lawyer who had risen through the courts of Spanish America to a senior seat on the Council of the Indies, the body that governed the empire overseas. The old university at Huesca, in his home region, commissioned the picture to honour a distinguished son. Goya, not yet the court's chief painter but close to it, shows him in a judge's robes with the sash of the Order of Charles III, one hand holding a paper that carries his own name. The portrait stayed out of public view for generations; Aragon's government bought it only in 2025.