Doña Sabasa García

There is a story attached to this portrait, and it may be too neat to be true. Goya was in Madrid painting an official likeness of Evaristo Pérez de Castro, a senior figure in the Spanish government, when a young woman of the family appeared. Her nickname was Sabasa, and she was still in her teens. The painter, so the tale goes, was so taken with her face that he set the commission aside and asked to paint her instead. Whatever the truth of it, here she is, glancing off to one side against a plain dark ground, a shawl drawn up over her shoulder. Goya made it in the years just before 1808, when French armies marched in and Spain fell into a long and brutal war.