Goya painted this charming but mysterious portrait in 1824, when he was seventy-eight years old. The sitter is fashionably dressed in the manner of the European middle class and has been tentatively identified as María Martínez de Puga. María was related by marriage to Dionisio Antonio de Puga, whose signature appears as a witness on the document in which a lawyer awards Goya the continuance of his salary as royal painter during his absence from the court.

Unlike the brightly colored, more highly finished portraits of kings and aristocrats that Goya painted earlier in his life, this picture may seem stripped down, even incomplete. It is this quality that led artists of succeeding generations to refer to the Spanish master as “the first Modernist.”

The woman’s head is very finely painted; you can even see the faint shadow of the gold chain on her neck. But everything else has been rendered very quickly, in simple muted colors. Her lace collar, for example, materializes from a few dabs of black with a dry brush; her handkerchief emerges from a gossamer web of transparent strokes. The portrait is of a marked modernity also thanks to the contrasting colors, the bold dark outlines, and the brushwork, the traces of which are clearly visible in the dress and in the background.