Porträt der Herzogin von Osuna

In 1785 Goya was still climbing, not yet the famous court painter he would become. One of the people who helped lift him was the woman in this portrait, María Josefa Pimentel, Duchess of Osuna, among the sharpest and most cultivated aristocrats in Madrid. She and her husband became early protectors of Goya, commissioning portraits of themselves and their children. She backed schools and charities, led a women's council in the city, and dressed in the French fashions she loved, the way she appears here with a feathered headdress and a fan. Painting her and her circle carried Goya into the enlightened Madrid elite. He would portray her again some years later, with the whole family gathered in a single canvas.