The Letter

This is one of a pair Goya kept together, both now in the same museum in Lille. Beside it hangs a cruel picture of two decrepit old women; this one shows youth, an elegant young woman reading a letter in bright sun while a companion raises a parasol to shade her and a little dog paws for attention. In the background women beat laundry at a river, ordinary work going on behind the finery. Goya painted it around 1814, in his sixties, after illness had left him deaf and Spain had been torn through by war with Napoleon's France. Some have wanted to see the reader as Leocadia Weiss, the much younger woman who shared his last years, though there is no firm proof.