Ritratto dell’attrice Antonia Zárate

Goya painted this around 1810, while Spain was being torn apart by Napoleon's occupation and Goya himself was quietly etching the horrors of that war onto copper plates. This is the other side of his work in those years, a paid portrait of Antonia Zárate, a well-known actress from the Madrid stage, seated on a sofa in a black lace mantilla. She looks out with a soft, tired melancholy. She was already unwell, and died of tuberculosis not long after, probably around 1811. It is thought her son ordered the picture after her death, worked up from an earlier portrait Goya had made of her. If it is fully by his hand, it is the only Goya in any Russian collection, hanging today in the Hermitage.