The Countess of Fernán Núñez

By 1803 Goya was the most sought-after portraitist in Madrid, and Spanish aristocrats had begun to admire English portraiture, with its sitters set out of doors rather than in stiff interiors. So he placed María Vicenta Solís, the young Countess of Fernán Núñez, on a fallen tree trunk in the open air. She was 23, married five years earlier, and she wears the maja costume then fashionable among noblewomen, a short jacket and a black mantilla pinned with a wide red ribbon. Her legs are set apart and her feet turned out, in a pose later viewers found almost too casual for a countess. The painting has a companion portrait of her husband, the Count, and the pair are still kept together in the family collection in Madrid.