Portrait of Cesar Arbasia, bust-length

Part of a series of portrait drawings Goya executed around 1798 to illustrate the Dictionary of Spanish Painters prepared by his friend Juan Augustín Ceán Bermúdez (1749-1829). Ten of the known drawings portray Spanish artists of the 17th Century while an eleventh portrait, probably intended as a frontispiece, represents Bermúdez himself. The dictionary was eventually published in 1800 but did not contain any illustrations.
The collector Don Valentín Carderera, who was the first to mention this group of drawings in an article published in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1860-3, dated the group to around 1798 and added that it comprised about twelve or thirteen sheets. He himself owned ten drawings from the series, three of them (portraits of Gerónimo Fernandez, Senen Vila and Francisco Salcillo y Alcaraz) which are untraced today. The present drawing and the two formerly in C. R. Rudolf's collection, were not listed in the Carderera inventories.
Ceán Bermúdez mentioned in his life of Arbasia 'un retrato dibujado al lapiz por D. Juan de Alfaro consta haber fallecido en el ano 1614 (one portrait drawn in pencil by Don Juan de Alfaro, it is stated that he died [Arbasia] in the year 1614'), on which the present drawing is probably based, X. de Salas, op. cit., pp. 16 and 19. Cesar Arbasia was a pupil of Federico Zuccaro and worked in Málaga and Cordoba around 1600.