Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (Spanish, 1746 – 1828)
Don Mañuel Garcia de la Prada, c. 1805-1808

Run Time: 4:51
Recorded by Juliet Wilson-Bareau, independent researcher

My name is Juliet Wilson-Bareau. I am an independent researcher. I’ve been working on the life and times and works of Francisco Goya for very many years now and I’m particularly interested in his paintings, of all periods. We are looking at Francisco Goya’s portrait of Manuel Garcia de la Prada. We think that it was painted some where between 1805 and 1808.

Garcia de la Prada was in his 30s when the portrait was painted. Garcia de la Prada was a very lively, active fellow. He was a banker. He was given very high appointments in Madrid at around this time. In 1800, he was given a court appointment and looked after all kinds of commercial interests for the court. And in 1811, under the French government of Spain, Garcia de la Prada became, effectively, the mayor of Madrid and he was very active in running the country. And this went on until General Wellington came in and finally drove the French armies out of Spain. And then he, as a sympathizer with the French, of course, had to leave in a hurry.

The painting is really one of his most ambitious male portraits. And it’s very striking that one can compare it with some of Goya’s portraits of some of the highest, highest-ranking aristocrats in Spain. And yet Garcia de la Prada is a bourgeoisie man, a working man, extremely intelligent, and forceful, but not a man with pretensions to aristocracy. And I think one of the things that must have endeared him to Goya, was his obvious passion for this little dog—a little bitch in fact—very clearly painted, showing that she is a female dog. And Goya was a great lover of animals. He was passionately addicted to hunting himself, and always had hunting dogs attached to him. [He] Made many drawings and even some paintings of dogs. And I think that he had very special relationship with this lovely little pug dog.

We presume that he is pictured, although he was probably painted in Goya’s studio—that he is pictured as if he were in his own home, with his dog, which is placed on a very handsome piece of furniture. And beside him is this very plain, rush-seated chair, ladderback, which was actually an item of furniture that is found in many, many of Goya’s portraits, not this particular one, that was probably Garcia de la Prada’s own chair—maybe he brought it with him to the studio. But in many of Goya’s portraits from the 1790s and 1800s, we see often quite wealthy-looking, extremely well-dressed gentlemen either sitting on or standing against this kind of very simple, almost poor you could say, sort of chair. But it is a chair that was much in use in Spain at the time.

The painting must have been absolutely magnificent at the time that Goya painted it. There are quite a number of portraits, where you see very elegant gentlemen in yellow breeches of this kind, which might be of perhaps a velvet or of satin. In the case of this portrait, it has at sometime in its life been rather harshly cleaned. And it is difficult to read the quality of the kind of material from which the clothes are actually made. But nevertheless, they are striking. They still describe the shape and the shapely legs of the sitter very well. And it is hoped, in fact, that this picture can go through some sort of conservation process, and be enhanced. Because one of the things that one notices is that the top hat on the chair doesn’t actually sit down on the chair. It seems to be sort of levitating, almost floating, above the rush-seated area of the chair. And this is probably because some glazing and shadows—transparent shadows—were removed in a cleaning process, probably many, many years ago.