Portrait of Juan Maria Osorio (c. 1786): Art, History and Details

Portrait of Juan Maria Osorio (c. 1786) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Agustín Esteve y Marques (Spanish, 1753–c. 1820).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Esteve y Marques enjoyed a successful early career as a court painter and society portraitist, working as an assistant to the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya before becoming court painter to King Charles IV. The young subject of this portrait is Juan Maria Osorio, one of three sons of Don Vicente Osorio Moscoso Fernandez de Cordoba, the 13th count of Altamira, who also commissioned multiple family portraits from Goya. Esteve and Goya often shared aristocratic patrons, and there are also portraits of the count and his wife attributed to Esteve. The portrait of Juan Maria is somewhat static in execution, the subject lacking vigor and psychological intensity in Esteve's depiction. Yet some of the stiffness of the Cleveland portrait may be due to the fact that this work was probably a posthumous portrait of Juan Maria, who died in 1785 at the age of five.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of Juan Maria Osorio
• Date: c. 1786
• Creator attribution: Agustín Esteve y Marques (Spanish, 1753–c. 1820)
• Culture: Spain
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 143.8 x 107.6 x 6.4 cm (56 5/8 x 42 3/8 x 2 1/2 in.); Unframed: 120 x 84 cm (47 1/4 x 33 1/16 in.)
• Collection: P - Spanish before 1800
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1946.431

A detail from the museum

The boy holds a string attached to a linnet, a type of finch popular as a pet.

Collection credit

Gift of the Hanna Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Catalogue of Paintings, Part 3: European Paintings of the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1982.
• Francis, Henry. "'Don Juan Maria Osorio-Alvarez: The Boy with a Linnet' by Goya." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 34, no. 6 (June 1947): 112-116.
• Spanish Paintings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Indianapolis, Indiana, The Art Association, John Herron Museum of Art 1963:

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.