Narcisa Barañana de Goicoechea

This portrait carries a small clue and a large question. On the sitter's ring is the name Goya, the kind of hidden signature Francisco Goya liked to use, and for a long time the picture passed as his, painted around 1815. Narcisa Baranana had married into the Goicoechea family, who were linked by marriage to Goya's own son, so a connection to the painter is plausible. She is dressed in the bold style of a maja, the fashionable Madrid woman of the day. In recent decades, though, some specialists have doubted the hand is Goya's at all, and the Metropolitan now lists it only as attributed to him. It came to New York in 1929 with the great collection of Louisine and Henry Havemeyer.