Manuela Goicoechea y Galarza

Goya's son Francisco Javier married Gumersinda Goicoechea on 5 July 1805, and for the wedding the painter made seven small portraits on round copper plates, each about eight centimetres across, a rare turn to miniature for him, two decades before the ivory miniatures of his Bordeaux years. He painted his son, the bride, her parents and her three sisters. Manuela was the eldest of those sisters, 20 years old here, turned in profile in a white gauze dress with an unusual collar and a white hat to match, laid in with fast, exact strokes against the dark ground he liked for portraits. In 1824 Manuela and her husband left Spain for Bordeaux, among those pushed out by the repression under Fernando VII, and in May 1827 her husband's brother, the banker Juan Bautista de Muguiro, sat for Goya in that city.