He is not well. His face is nearly as pale as the bed sheets. He’s too weak even to drink without help. And are those figures in the shadows real or hallucinations? Who knows? The old man has succumbed to that familiar feeling of weak and aching muscles, mind confused by feverish dreams, days lost to sleep. The painter of this picture—Francisco Goya, in a self-portrait—knew illness all too well. The younger man was his doctor, Eugenio Garcia Arrieta. Goya recovered to live another eight years and produce many more pictures, including this gift of thanks for his doctor.
We don’t need a doctor’s opinion to know this patient’s vitals are slipping. Just compare the pallor of his face with the doctor’s ruddy complexion—the picture, as it were, of health. Even his robe is a drab shade of the doctor’s bright green coat.
In the Age of Reason, doctors began to supplant priests at sickbeds. Is Goya alluding to the latter’s chalice of Communion wine with this glass of red medicine? He clearly puts his faith in the good doctor’s tonic.
Scholars argue about whether the shadowy figures in the background are Goya’s servants and a visiting priest, or demonic spirits populating his feverish dreams.
“Goya gives thanks to his friend Arrieta for the expert care with which he saved his life from an acute and dangerous illness which he suffered at the close of the year 1819 when he was 73 years old. He painted it in 1820.”