When I worked as an English teacher for speakers of other languages, I would show my more advanced students paintings from different cultures and eras and ask them to describe what they saw. My favourite painting to date is Francisco Goya’s mammoth painting of Charles IV of Spain and His Family, completed in the summer of 1801, and I did indeed pull up my old dusty TEFL notes to recover the feeling I had when I saw this painting for the first time. I’m no artist, but I do love art (looking at it, that is, not creating it myself) and what struck me initially was the way that the painting doesn’t come across as conventionally ‘Spanish’; that is, to me, at least, an English woman. If you’re a Spanish person reading this article, and you feel it looks Spanish, I would rather—for the sake of my sanity—stay unaware and unfazed. 

It is one of those paintings where the more you see, the more you find. That was the cave I pushed my students into, like teaching a child to walk. They just had to try, and do it. I would start by asking them to identify the eldest son and heir to the throne, and to explain why he was positioned in such a way. I will spoil this for you now, unless you want to stop reading and figure it out for yourself. It’s the boy in blue, Prince Ferdinand, standing on the far left and dressed in a striking royal blue coat. Positioned clearly in the front row and wearing the blue sash of the Order of Charles III, his dominant forward stance marks him as the successor to the Spanish crown. Stiff, haughty, and aloof, his posture tells you everything you need to know. His status is unquestioned, but the shadow across his figure is a sly hint at Ferdinand’s turbulent, conspiratorial relationship with his parents, and an accidental foreshadowing of the deceptive, troubled reign he would later bring to Spain. Rather ominous, rather prophetic.

The next question (asking as if I were hosting a game show where the prize was £1 million), would be: “Who do you think the woman near Ferdinand is, and why is she looking away?” I loved teaching English primarily for this reason; you ask one question to many different people who have run different races in their lives, and you are met with a plethora of theories. “Maybe she’s someone who was kicked out of the family.” It could be, but then why paint her at all? “Maybe she’s a maid.” In that attire? Unlikely. Only one student got it right—but I don’t promote favouritism—that when Goya worked on the painting between 1800 and 1801, the sixteen-year-old Prince Ferdinand was single, ready to mingle and find his forever wife. Marriage negotiations were underway with several European royal courts in a rush to find the perfect woman who would secure the bloodline, but at this point, a bride had not been selected. The difficult situation put Goya in a difficult situation too; how could he paint her there if she was not real? But more fascinatingly, why did he still insist on having her in there? She was important, of course. She was the one who would carry his line. 

She was not the only important woman in the painting. Do you see how, depicted dead-centre, there is a woman? Visually and politically, Queen Maria Luisa takes centre-stage; this is her town and her family. Clasping the hands of her youngest children to signify her maternal duty, she commands the centre of the canvas with an uncompromising glare. King Charles, her husband, stands slightly off-centre to the right. He is heavily decorated with his medals, yet not decorated enough to hide his look of disconnect. In the real world, Queen Maria Luisa wielded immense political influence over state affairs alongside her minister, Manuel Godoy, while King Charles IV took a more passive role. It’s refreshing to see a court painter capture political reality over royal vanity, giving us a rare, unfiltered glimpse into a monarchy where the queen held all the cards.

I can’t speak on behalf of the Spaniards, but looking at Goya’s canvas always brings me back to our own institution in Britain. Historically, the royal family’s personal whims and power struggles dictated foreign policy, wars and the fate of an empire. Today, our British monarchy feels like a distant shadow of that former world. The prestige once held has steadily dissolved into something more akin to gossip and betrayal — much like the dramas of any ordinary family. 

This is what made the painting such a great tool for my students. Goya was painting a portrait, of course, but he was also painting history. Without realising it, my students weren’t merely practising their English vocabulary or building grammar structures—they were reading a moment in history when an empire was starting to crack. Just a few years later, Napoleon would sweep through Spain, pushing the nation into a devastating war of independence, and forcing both Charles IV and Ferdinand to abdicate. A nation plunged into chaos, a family imploding. It’s a rather grim message to give my students, but I wouldn’t have changed it. It is a shaping and formative experience to reflect on the people who came before us, whether we’re Spanish or not, and consider just how fragile power really is.