Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos

Goya's portrait of Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos from 1782, in the National Sculpture Museum at Valladolid, is an early portrait of the most important Spanish Enlightenment thinker — reformer, economist, poet, and eventually political prisoner under Ferdinand VII — made some sixteen years before the famous 1798 version now in the Prado. The comparison between the two portraits documents both the physical change in Jovellanos across sixteen years of political engagement and the extraordinary development of Goya's portraiture across the same period: the 1782 portrait, competent and characterful, gives way to the 1798 masterpiece, with its deeper psychological penetration and freer handling. Jovellanos's Report on the Agrarian Law (1794), arguing for land reform and the dissolution of entailed estates, was one of the foundational documents of Spanish liberalism, and his subsequent persecution and imprisonment under Ferdinand VII made him a symbol of Enlightenment values destroyed by political reaction. Goya's series of Jovellanos portraits — of which the Valladolid early work and the Prado mature version are the most important — constitutes the visual biography of Spain's greatest Enlightenment figure.

Goya renders the young Jovellanos with the crisp technique of his early portrait style, capturing the intellectual energy that would make him Spain's leading Enlightenment thinker.