Family Reunion

(at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City)

By ROBERT EDWARD BULLOCK, Special to the Sun | April 25, 2014

For the first time in nearly 230 years, a family of six from Madrid is spending time together. In "Goya and the Altamira Family" the Metropolitan Museum of Art unites a set of portraits commissioned by the Count of Altamira, the director of what is now the Banco de España. This small grouping highlights some of Goya's peculiar grandeur and melancholy.

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, b.1746, was a fabulously successful court painter in Madrid, a portraitist of the royal family and the Spanish aristocracy. Numbered among the last of the Old Masters while being the premier Modernist, his work possesses the repeating minor chord of a somber melody, as even his bright colors hold some tone of lament.

(Read the entire review at The New York Sun.)

^ Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes), 1746-1828, "Vicente Joaquín Osorio Moscoso y Guzmán, 12th Conde de Altamira (1756-1816)," 1787 (Banco de España, Madrid.)

^ Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes), 1746-1828, "Maria Ignacia Álvarez de Toledo, Condesa de Altamira and Her Daughter, MaríaAgustina," 1787-88 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection)

^ Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes), 1746-1828, "Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga (1784-1792)," 1787-88               (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Jules Bache Collection)

^ Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes), 1746-1828, "Vicente Osorio de Moscoso, Count of Trastamara" (Private Collection)

^ Esteve Y Marques "Portrait of Juan Maria Osorio" (Cleveland Museum of Art)