Nude Woman Reclining Against a Rock

In December 1825, writing from Bordeaux, Goya told a friend that he had spent the previous winter painting on ivory and now had nearly 40 experiments. He insisted they were original miniatures, done without the fine dots of the usual miniature, closer to the brush of Velázquez than to that of Mengs, the neoclassical painter who had ruled taste at the Spanish court in Goya's youth. This tiny plate, under 9 centimetres a side, is one of them. He covered the ivory with carbon black, let a drop of water fall on it to lift part of the black at random, then worked the shapes that appeared with watercolour and scratched in the highlights. Here the stains became a nude woman lying against a rock. It belonged to the Scottish historian of Spanish art Sir William Stirling Maxwell and stayed with his descendants until a London sale in 1963, where the museum bought it.