Spaniard in Minneapolis

Buffalo's coup (see above) was matched by an important art buy in another U.S. city. For 15 years, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts has been hunting for a first-class Goya. Last week the master's Self Portrait with Doctor Arrieta was hanging in the museum's place of honor (Minneapolis' prized Rembrandt, Lucretia, had been moved aside to make room for it). Goya painted the Self Portrait in 1820 at the peak of his genius, as a tribute to a man he firmly believed saved his life. In 1819 Goya was 73 years old, totally deaf and seriously ill. Sickness always made the touchy Spaniard roar with anguish and self-pity. "I'm so frantic, I can scarcely stand myself," he told a friend. But a sympathetic doctor named Arrieta brought him around, and the artist decided to put his gratitude into a picture.

In muted greens, reds and violets, Goya shows himself in bed, head back, limp hands feebly clutching the bed sheets. His eyes are puffy, his thin, greying hair mussed and damp with fever. Behind him sits the calm doctor, supporting his patient with a strong left arm, gently urging him to drink a tumbler of medicine. There are three figures in Goya's darkened background: a priest, a woman (possibly Goya's cousin and housekeeper, Leocadia Weiss), and a mysterious, gaping head which may be Goya's symbol for death.

Painter Goya--who died eight years after he finished the picture--presented Self Portrait to his physician as a gift; later it traveled around private collections in Madrid and Paris until 1952, when a Manhattan art gallery brought it to the U.S. What the Minneapolis Institute paid for it no one would say, but art critics consider it among Goya's best works.

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