Retrato da marquesa de Montehermoso

Goya painted this around 1810, in the middle of the worst years Spain had known in his lifetime. French armies under Napoleon's brother Joseph, installed as king in Madrid, held the country, and a brutal war of independence was tearing through it, the same war Goya set down in his savage prints. The sitter came from the family of the Marquesses of Montehermoso, whose palace in the northern city of Vitoria had become a center of the French court's social life during the occupation. Painting portraits like this meant working for people entangled with the occupiers, a position that would turn dangerous once the French were driven out. Goya keeps the mood quiet and inward here, the loosened brushwork and soft light already leaning toward the darker, more Romantic manner of his later years.