Goya's Portraits

This spring, a special focused exhibition of approximately ten paintings by the Spanish master Francisco de Goya will be presented exclusively at the San Diego Museum of Art from April 8 to June 18, 2006. The display will highlight one of the Museum's most notable paintings, Goya's Marquis of Sofraga, providing context for Goya, his work, and the sitter of the SDMA painting.

This exhibition marks the Museum's first major collaboration with the Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City, which has organized a large-scale exhibition of the artist's work (Goya, November 17, 2005-March 3, 2006). SDMA's exhibition will feature an intriguing selection of ten important portraits from this larger Mexico City show, with works coming from public and private collections in San Francisco, Indianapolis, Brooklyn, Boston, Detroit, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico.

These portraits are extraordinary documents of person, place, and time and exemplify the tradition of portraiture. The carefully selected works span the artist's career and include official, full-length portraits of luminaries of late 18th- and early 19th-century Spain.

Goya's powerful representations will offer museum visitors a rare opportunity to explore firsthand the work of this seminal figure in modern art history and address such issues as the role of official portraiture as well as Goya's politics and biography.

Goya's Portraits has been organized by the San Diego Museum of Art in collaboration with the Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City. The exhibition is made possible by the generous support of Jeanne Jones, Tiffany and Co., the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, the County of San Diego Community Enhancement Program, and members of the San Diego Museum of Art.

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