L'Immacolata Concezione

This small, quickly worked oil is all that survives of a project Goya carried out in 1784, when he was a rising court painter not yet 40. It is his working sketch for a large altarpiece of the Immaculate Conception, commissioned the year before for a college church of the military Order of Calatrava in Salamanca. The finished paintings were destroyed during the Peninsular War, the French invasion that tore through Spain after 1808, so only this modest study is left to tell us what the altarpiece looked like. It came down to us because it belonged to the writer and reformer Jovellanos, the friend who had arranged the commission. You can see Goya thinking fast here, laying in the Virgin and her ring of angels with a few loaded strokes.