Portrait of Senora Ceán Bermudez

The woman here was the wife of one of Goya's close friends, Juan Agustin Cean Bermudez, the scholar who in 1800 published the first great dictionary of Spanish artists, the book that gathered the record of painters like Velazquez in one place. Goya painted her in the early 1790s, and because it was for a friend rather than the court, he let himself loose. The dress is all quick, fresh strokes: ribbons, a haze of tulle at the collar, a red velvet sewing box at her side. The brushwork is so free that critics have reached for Manet to describe it, though Goya set it down almost a century before Manet was born.