Francisco Goya
I feel guilty that it took me so long to realize how many amazing portraits the Spanish artists Francisco Goya created. Just look at this one; I can't take my eyes off it!
The half-length portrait depicts a young woman dressed in typical Spanish attire, a white shirt and a black mantilla. In spite of her maja attire, the richness of the textiles and her ladylike appearance give the picture an aristocratic elegance; at this time wealthy Spanish "people of fashion" often wore the styles of lower class urban dandies and their female equivalents, as seen in Goya's famous clothed version of La Maja, which you can check in our Archive. (The unclothed version of La Maja is also available in the Archive.)
The sitter is Doña Isabel de Porcel, according to an inscription on the back of the original canvas. Goya exhibited a portrait of Doña Isabel at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid in 1805, a year before he painted a portrait of her husband. When an X-ray image was made of this painting during conservation treatment in 1980, another portrait was unexpectedly found underneath; you can just make out the dark curve of an eyebrow on Doña Isabel’s chin and the stripes of a jacket through her right sleeve.
Despite being painted with great flair and long considered one of Goya’s most dazzling portraits, doubts have recently been cast over whether it really is by Goya.
P.S. Here you can read about the mysterious Pinturas Negras that reveal Goya’s darkest secrets...