page_title: Vicente López Portaña
section_title: Court painter
hierarchical_section_title: Vicente López Portaña / Court painter
context_page_description: Vicente López Portaña, OIC was a Spanish painter, considered one of the best portrait painters of his time.
context_section_description: When king Charles IV visited the city of Turia in 1802, the king appointed him an honorary court painter at the same time he gave him some commissions that he executed successfully. He was already well known and regarded when in 1814 López was called to the court of Ferdinand VII, the Spanish king, who appointed him official court painter and received a royal appointment. Shortly thereafter he succeeded Goya as Royal Court Painter during the reign of Ferdinand VII, who also appointed him as drawing teacher of his second wife, Maria Isabella of Portugal, and later of his third wife, Maria Josepha Amalia of Saxony. In 1817 he was named President of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando.
  Vicente López was a prolific painter executing many religious, allegorical, historic and mythological scenes, but he specialized in portraits. During his long career he painted nearly every notable person in Spain during the first half of the 1800s.
  In 1826, López painted a portrait of Francisco Goya when the famous master visited the court from Bordeaux, where the Aragonese painter was then living. Goya was then 80 and would die two years later. It was said that Goya got bored posing for his colleague who was very meticulous and a stickler for detail, and that for this reason the portrait is inferior to others by López. However, for this precise reason, and because of the strong personality of the model this is one of López's most lively and best-known works.
  Vicente López spent the remainder of his life in Madrid painting portraits of statesmen, academics, and other important figures, as well as dramatic and emotional religious subjects. When he died, in Madrid, he was court painter of Queen Isabella II. He was seventy eight years old.
caption: Portrait of Francisco Goya, 1826.
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