Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker. He is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His paintings, drawings, and engravings reflected contemporary historical upheavals and influenced important 19th- and 20th-century painters. Goya is often referred to as the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns.

A court painter was an artist who painted for the members of a royal or princely family, sometimes on a fixed salary and on an exclusive basis where the artist was not supposed to undertake other work. Painters were the most common, but the court artist might also be a court sculptor. In Western Europe, the role began to emerge in the mid-13th century. By the Renaissance, portraits, mainly of the family, made up an increasingly large part of their commissions, and in the early modern period one person might be appointed solely to do portraits, and another for other work, such as decorating new buildings.