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Woman in Gray

Francisco Goya -

Woman in Grey by Francisco de Goya, 1954, portrays a Spanish woman sitting in a chair.

Commentary by Frederick S. Wight:

IN SPAIN THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN a sense of form, of dignity and decorum, of vitality constrained. In costume, this expresses itself in grays and blacks. Goya’s early portraits show us the nobility following the fashion of the French court. The women—with some added reticence—are in the costume of Marie Antoinette. In the portrait of this young woman in gray the costume again follows the French lead. At some remove it is Directoire, with its low cut, its high waist. Even the casual dressing of the natural hair is nineteenth-century. The hated French Revolution has come and gone and worked its release. But for all that the young woman in the uncomfortable ladder-back chair is assured rather than liberated: at least she knows precisely who and where she is, which is one of the consolations under an autocracy. Goya’s early portraits could be stiff—either the sitter was arthritic with rank or the painter was young and overawed. His latest portraits tend to be deeply and tragically personal. There is a middle period when Goya still sees quite objectively, and paints with the airiest freedom and assurance. His most fortunate subjects are his women sitters—younger women whose physical maturity is ahead of their experience of life. They are ready for whatever a narrow convention will allow them, and a portrait by Goya, the Court Painter, is no small experience in their lives.


Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was a Spanish painter and printmaker born in 1746 in Fuendetodos, Spain. He was a painter in the royal court and was a lead commentator on art in his era.

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