Attributed to Francisco Goya

In 1987 restorers at the Prado cleaned a small picture of a picador on horseback, pike in hand, and found another man underneath. The sash of the Order of Charles III, the three-cornered hat of a commander of the royal Lifeguards, the features themselves: this had been an equestrian portrait of Manuel Godoy, the favourite who governed Spain for Carlos IV. The bullfighter was painted over him around 1808, when Godoy fell from power and owning his likeness turned awkward. Who did the overpainting is not known.

That canvas sits under this heading, and it explains why the heading exists. Attributed to Goya is the most confident hedge a museum has. The cataloguer thinks the work probably came from Goya's own hand and declines to promise it, which claims a great deal more than follower of, a phrase that hands the picture to another painter altogether.

Two others under the same heading are in New York, bought around 1900 by the Havemeyers, a sugar family whose collection reached the Metropolitan in 1929. Both now carry the softer line. On the portrait of Narcisa Barañana de Goicoechea, Goya's signature is painted onto the sitter's ring, a device he liked, and specialists have questioned the picture all the same. The other, Majas on a Balcony, has a rival. A version in a Swiss private collection is now generally treated as the original, which leaves the Metropolitan's canvas a replica, a copy made for its first owner, or a genuine Goya spoiled by restoration.

Attributions here travel in both directions. In 2008 the Prado removed Goya's name from The Colossus and offered it to his assistant Asensio Juliá. Scholars including Nigel Glendinning argued hard against the decision, and in 2021 the museum put Goya's name back without explaining why.