This week’s picture is Francisco de Goya’s intimate and intriguing depiction of The Family of the Infante Don Luis. Painted in 1784, it was Goya’s first large-scale royal portrait, an unprecedentedly informal work which broke the mould of conventional state portraiture. Despite its importance it not a well known painting, being owned by the Magnani Foundation and normally housed in an out-of-the-way villa close to Parma, in Italy. To mark the 250th anniversary of Goya’s birth, the National Gallery in London has arranged to borrow it. It was placed on display in Room 1 yesterday.

Goya shows us the King of Spain’s younger brother sitting at a card table, staring fixedly into space, while his wife patiently endures the attentions of her hairdresser. The royal couple are surrounded by their children, servants, friends, court musicians and artists – including Goya himself, who sits at his easel in the lower left-hand corner of the composition. As he observes the scene, he himself is observed with wide-eyed interest by the Infante’s daughter, Maria Teresa. Almost everyone else in the group has a mysterious but pointedly expressive look on their face: a scowl, a smile, a quizzical glance, a contemplative or melancholic stare. Goya has frozen a moment in the life of a prince and his consort and presented it, teasingly, as if it were a scene from a novel. His portrait has the character of a psychological puzzle. He makes us want to know who these people are, what had been going on between them – and what happened next.

Born in 1727, the Infante (or prince) Don Luis de Borbon was the fifth child of Philip V and his second wife, Isabella Farnese. His parents had planned a religious career for him, making him Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo at the...

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