Bernarda Tavira

Goya painted this around 1787, the year Bernarda Tavira's son Antonio married into the Barbachano family. She was 60 by then, born in Antequera in Andalusia, and Goya set her down plainly, in a purple satin dress, a powdered wig gone slightly blue, a diamond necklace on a black velvet ribbon. It was one of three portraits he made of the Adan de Yarza family while he was working as a painter to the king in Madrid. For nearly 150 years the picture hung far from any museum, in the family's country house at Zubieta on the Basque coast. Then in 1936 the war reached it. The Basque government evacuated the collection, and the following year the portrait was carried across the border into France, where it stayed in private hands. It has since come home, been restored, and been shown in Bilbao.