The portraits of his sensuous, passion-ridden queen are equally fearless, true even to brutality. Maria Luisa was a courtesan seated upon the throne of Spain. Velazquez, it has been wisely said, redeemed the face of Mariana of Austria in his portrait by making her unapproachable icy pride the keynote in his composition. Goya extenuates nothing. He shows the queen, _décolletée_ to vulgarity in her insolently vulgar gown, with gleaming arms and bosom exposed as a snare, which is watched over by the greedy, hawk-like eyes. It is the woman she was, the ‘woman who loved men better perhaps than she was loved by them,’ the courtesan that the artist knew and flattered and despised. Of the picture of the ‘Family of Charles IV.,’ with its fourteen life-size figures, it has been written that it ‘mirrors the hidden merriment with which Goya recorded the Court history.’ Here is a faithful exposition of Goya’s estimate of the Spanish royal family; an estimate which has never been so remorselessly expressed by any other delineator of royal groups. They are depicted in their resplendent uniforms and rich gowns, they have all the dignity that is derived from gorgeous trappings, but Goya has not spared them, or us, a tittle of their pitiful stupidity, their coarse insolence, their mental and moral degeneracy. ‘The heads are admirably painted, as Gautier admitted, ‘and are full of life, delicacy and intelligence’; but the French critic’s general verdict upon the group represented is his best tribute to the genius of the painter;--‘a grocer’s family who have won the big lottery prize.’ The more closely one studies these royal portraits the more one becomes convinced of their truth. To-day they remain as real to us as the sympathetic, Velazquezesque likenesses of the painter Bayeu in the Prado, or of Dr. Peral in the National Gallery. It is almost impossible for any one to be in a position to award the palm for supreme excellence among Goya’s portraits, for besides being so numerous, they are widely distributed among the aristocratic families of Spain, and many are practically inaccessible to the student. There are fewer than two dozen of his portraits in the Prado, only two in the National Gallery, and one in the Louvre. Few people are familiar with more than a certain number of his portraits. For this reason there are many different opinions as to the comparative merit of his pictures, but the individual opinions all constitute a remarkable tribute to the painter’s genius in catching the likeness and reflecting the character of his subjects.