La Comtesse de Chinchón

Goya painted María Teresa in 1800, when she was about 20 and pregnant, married off to Manuel Godoy, the most powerful man in Spain and a favourite of the queen. It was not a marriage she had chosen. Goya seats her a little uncertainly, hands folded, and works the whole picture in silvery greys and gauze so thin the light seems to pass through it. In her hair are ears of wheat, the old emblem of the harvest goddess and of fertility, a nod to the child she was carrying. Years later an X-ray showed Goya had painted her over an earlier canvas, a standing portrait of Godoy himself, scraped down and covered. The Prado bought the picture from the family's descendants in the year 2000.