The Time and the old woman

Goya painted this around 1810, by then old, deaf, and living through the wreckage of the Peninsular War in Spain. Two withered women sit preening in jewels and fine dress, one holding a mirror, utterly absorbed in themselves. Behind them looms a winged old man with a broom, Time himself, ready to sweep them away, and they have not noticed. The figure in white, glittering with a diamond arrow in her hair, is often read as a jab at Queen Maria Luisa, who owned just such an ornament. On the little book the seated woman clutches, Goya lettered two Spanish words, Que tal, roughly How are things. It hangs in the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille.