La Chiquita Piconera (la piccola bracere)

Romero de Torres finished this in February 1930, and it turned out to be the last painting he completed. He died in Cordoba, his home city, that May. The girl tends a brazier of glowing charcoal, which is what a piconera did, poking the coals with a small shovel to keep them alight. She was a local model, Maria Teresa Lopez, only about 14 at the time. Behind her, through the opening, is Cordoba itself, the Guadalquivir river, the Roman bridge and the Calahorra tower. The painter had spent his career setting Andalusian women against these same city views, and here at the end he placed one of his best-known figures in front of the town where he was born and would soon die.