Majas auf dem Balkon

Two young women in Spanish dress lean at a balcony rail, brightly lit, while behind them two men wait in shadow, hats low, hard to read. The composition is Goya's, from around the years when Napoleon's brother was pushed onto the Spanish throne, and it plays on a familiar street scene of Madrid, the confident young majas on display and the watchful figures behind. Whether Goya's own hand painted this particular canvas is genuinely disputed. It first surfaced only some years after his death, and scholars have long been divided, some holding it an original, others giving it to his son Javier or to a close follower. The Metropolitan Museum now labels it simply as attributed to Goya, and a second version in a Swiss collection is often argued to be the prime one.