The Duchess of Abrantes

By 1816 Goya was 70, deaf for two decades, and near the end of his years as painter to Spain's grandees. This is his last known portrait of a great lady. She is Manuela Giron y Pimentel, the young Duchess of Abrantes, daughter of the powerful House of Osuna, and she has dressed in the newest French fashion with a spray of flowers set in her hair. In her hands she holds a sheet of music, a nod to how much she loved to sing. The colours are quick and bright in an almost eighteenth-century way, yet the smeared light and the dark, nervous strokes already point toward the strange, private paintings Goya would make in the following decade.