Portrait of Isidoro Maiquez

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes · c. 1807

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

82.3 × 63.3 cm (32 3/8 × 24 7/8 in.); Framed: 120.4 × 94.7 cm (47 3/8 × 37 1/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Neoclassicism

Goya's portrait of the celebrated Spanish actor Isidoro Maiquez carries the charged immediacy of a man caught mid-thought, his dark eyes fixing the viewer with an intelligence that feels almost unsettling. By 1807 Goya had long established himself as the preeminent portraitist of the Spanish court, but it is in portraits of friends and intellectuals that his genius shows most freely. Here the brushwork is confident and loose — rich darks built up against a warm neutral ground, the face rendered with a directness that strips away any sense of official posturing. Maiquez was among the most admired theatrical performers of his day, and Goya appears to have painted him as an equal rather than a subject. The two men were known to be friends, and that familiarity is legible in the painting's lack of ceremony — there is no prop, no symbolic backdrop, nothing between the sitter and the eye. Our hand-painted oil reproduction is executed on canvas using traditional oil pigments, capturing the tonal depth and gestural confidence that make this one of Goya's most compelling character studies — a painting that rewards close looking in a way a print simply cannot.