Charles IV of Spain and His Family

Charles IV of Spain and His Family (La familia de Carlos IV) is a large oil-on-canvas group portrait by Francisco Goya, begun in 1800 and finished in 1801; it is in the Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Goya had been a painter to the royal chamber since 1789 and had just been promoted to First Chamber Painter, the post once held by Velázquez, when in spring 1800 he was asked for a portrait of the whole royal family. Letters from Queen María Luisa of Parma to Manuel Godoy let the process be followed step by step. Between May and July 1800, while the court was at Aranjuez, Goya painted each sitter separately from life, as the queen wished, sparing them long joint sittings; five of these oil sketches survive in the Prado. He worked on the final canvas until 1801.

The family stands in a frieze, the men wearing the sash of the Order of Charles III. The queen is at the centre, an arm around the Infanta María Isabel and holding the hand of the young Francisco de Paula, who in turn holds the king's hand. At left the future Ferdinand VII, in blue, stands with his brother Carlos María Isidro beside a young woman whose face is turned away, a stand-in for the prince's still unchosen bride. In the shadows behind them Goya shows himself at a large canvas seen from the back, a clear reference to Velázquez's Las Meninas; Louis-Michel van Loo's 1743 Family of Philip V is the other model.

The picture has often been read as satire. Théophile Gautier likened the family to a corner grocer who had just won the lottery, and Renoir is said to have joked that the king looked like an innkeeper. Robert Hughes rejected this, arguing that a court portraitist could not keep his job by mocking his patrons and that Goya in fact flattered them. Recorded in the Royal Palace inventory of 1814, the canvas, 280 × 336 cm, entered the Prado in 1824 on the orders of Ferdinand VII.