Young Lady Wearing a Mantilla and Basquina

Around 1800, Spanish women from the streets to the court were dressing as majas, in the black lace mantilla and the dark basquiña skirt, partly as a point of pride while French taste pressed in on Madrid. Goya painted this young woman in exactly that costume, turned to catch your eye. Nobody knows for certain who she was. Later owners liked the story that she was a bookseller's wife from the Calle de las Fuentes, but that reads as romantic legend more than record. What survives is the ease of the pose, and the way the pale face and hands lift out of all that black. She holds a folded fan, the everyday accessory of the look she wears.