Portrait of the Poet Moratín

Portrait of the Poet Moratín from 1824, in the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, depicts Goya's closest literary friend during the most isolated period of his life. Leandro Fernández de Moratín — playwright, poet, and the finest Spanish comic dramatist of his generation — had been forced into exile in France following the restoration of Ferdinand VII's absolute authority, and in Bordeaux he and Goya found themselves in the same position of elderly liberals displaced by political reaction. The portrait was painted during Goya's Bordeaux period, when his technique was becoming increasingly fluid and gestural — he was experimenting with lithography, a new medium that allowed gestural drawing at larger scale — and its handling has a directness and simplicity that reflects the late manner he was developing. The two men had known each other since at least the 1790s; Moratín was Goya's most sustained intellectual friendship after the death of Jovellanos, and the Bordeaux portrait of him in old age, made by an old painter in exile, carries the weight of that long shared history.

Goya renders his friend with intimate warmth and psychological depth, using the dark palette and broad handling of his late style to create a portrait of intellectual companionship and shared exile.