María Teresa de Borbón y Vallabriga, después condesa de Chinchón

Goya painted this in the late summer of 1783, as a guest at the country palace of the Infante Don Luis, a royal brother who had married beneath his rank and lived away from the Madrid court. The subject is his little daughter Maria Teresa, only about four, dressed in the grown-up finery of the day, a court gown and a white lace mantilla that nearly swallows her, and set on a terrace before the blue line of the Sierra de Gredos. It was the first of four times Goya would paint her across her life. She grew up to become the Condesa de Chinchon and, less happily, the wife of Manuel Godoy, the most powerful and most resented minister in Spain.