Charles IV of Spain and His Family

The royal family of Spain lines up in glittering silks and sashes - and Goya paints them with merciless honesty, the faces vacant, pompous, or plain, the queen dominating the center. The painter himself stands at his easel in the shadows at the left, just as Velazquez had done in Las Meninas. Now in the Prado, Charles IV of Spain and His Family is a court portrait that verges on satire, a dazzling display of finery wrapped around a group of strikingly ordinary, unidealized people, painted by a court artist who saw all too clearly.