Doña Amalia Bonells de Costa

X-rays of this portrait show a different picture under the black. When Goya first painted her, around 1805, Amalia Bonells de Costa wore a brightly embroidered dress and had roses pinned into her mantilla. Her father, Jaime Bonells, was physician to the Duchess of Alba, and after he died in 1813 the clothes were painted over, so she sits now in mourning black with a closed fan in her gloved hands. Goya was 67 by then, deaf for 20 years, and Spain was coming out of the war with Napoleon's armies that he was recording in the etchings later called the Disasters of War. He painted her small son Pepito Costa y Bonells around the same time.