Goya: The Portraits

Who was Francesca de Goya Lucientes really? Like most titans who have changed the cultural landscape (Rembrandt, Delacroix, Cher), he is known only by the one name: Goya. He was born in 1746 and survived Napoleon. He was versatile; jumping around the genres, delivering quivering maidens in silky nighties and latterly, dark, disturbing, depictions of the horrors of war painted onto the walls of a crumbling French cottage. But this epic exhibition (and it is truly epic) focuses on his portraits, of which 150 still survive, with almost half of them now on view at Trafalgar Square. Poets, fellow painters, his wife, the Spanish royal court, our own Duke of Wellington – the only painting to be stolen from the National Gallery. And several self-portraits, cleverly interspersed through this chronologically curated show.

Like Rembrandt, Goya was the master of the ‘selfie’, never sparing his own blushes. Self- Portrait Before An Easel (1792-95) for instance, is a tiny masterpiece showing him shoehorned into the clothes of a majo, side on, his stunted silhouette presenting a middle-aged nightmare. There are no mistakes of course, he was obsessed with clothes, using them as weapons against the backbiting at court, his paintbrush condemning the conceited with the tiniest of strokes.

It’s arguable that he saved his greatest tributes for his friend and patron, the Duchess of Alba. She first commissioned him in 1794 when she was 32 and the two remained close, unconsummated lovers possibly, until her early death eight years later. It was a relationship that danced around power, with her conceding hers in order to win his approval. The Duchess Of Alba (1797) is the most important loan in the show, borrowed from the Hispanic Society of America – it has only left the States once before. Here she stands, covered in intricate layers of black lace, pointing down to the ground to where Goya has signed his name in the sand. It remains one of the 18th century’s most enduring images.

The 19th century provided the show’s final portrait, Self-Portrait With Doctor Arrieta (1820), a tribute to the doctor who had saved his life a year earlier. It is pure Goya, a dramatic combination of light and dark, his own pallid figure throwing light onto the face of his saviour.

Irresistible.

Until 10 January 2016, at The National Gallery, London WC2: 020-7420 9794, www.nationalgallery.org.uk