Portrait of a Lady with a Mantilla

Goya painted this small portrait around 1823, and the date carries a lot. That year the brief liberal experiment in Spain collapsed. A French army marched in to restore Ferdinand VII to absolute power, and the persecution of liberals that followed pushed Goya, then in his late seventies and a lifelong liberal, to leave Spain for good the next year and settle across the border in Bordeaux. This is a face from those last Spanish months. The woman is wrapped in a black mantilla against an almost black background, so that only her pale skin and a few touches of white carry the light. Her identity has never been settled. She is usually thought to be Leocadia Zorrilla, the much younger woman who kept his house and shared his final years, though there is no document to prove it, and Goya left the picture unlabelled. What is certain is the mood: nothing here flatters or explains her, just a steady, sombre look held in near-darkness. The canvas passed through several private hands over the next century and a half before the regional government of Aragón bought it in 1991 for the museum in Zaragoza, the city where Goya had first trained as a boy.