La Laitière de Bordeaux

Goya painted this in Bordeaux around 1826, an old man in his late seventies, living out a self-imposed exile in France among liberal friends after the Spanish crown turned reactionary. He was deaf, and had been for decades. The woman is thought to be Leocadia Weiss, the companion who looked after him at the end, or possibly her daughter Rosario. It is one of the last things he made before he died in 1828. Stand close and the surface almost dissolves. The blues are laid on in loose, broken touches that read like paint first and a shawl second, closer to what painters would be doing in Paris fifty years later than to anything around Goya at the time. Some historians have even wondered aloud whether Rosario, herself a painter, had a hand in it.