Герцогиня Абрантес

By 1816 Goya was 70, deaf for two decades, and near the end of his years as painter to Spain's grandees. This is his last known portrait of a great lady. She is Manuela Giron y Pimentel, the young Duchess of Abrantes, daughter of the powerful House of Osuna, and she has dressed in the newest French fashion with a spray of flowers set in her hair. In her hands she holds a sheet of music, a nod to how much she loved to sing. The colours are quick and bright in an almost eighteenth-century way, yet the smeared light and the dark, nervous strokes already point toward the strange, private paintings Goya would make in the following decade.