Portrait of a Spanish Noblewoman

Josefa de Castilla Portugal y van Asbrock de Garcini (1775–about 1850), painted in 1804 by Francisco de Goya, is one of the Spanish master's most quietly radical portraits. Twenty-nine years old and visibly pregnant, Doña Josefa was the wife of Colonel Ignacio Garcini y Queralt, an army engineer whom Goya painted the same year as a pendant piece — yet where her husband's portrait is formal and reserved, hers is startlingly informal, her hair loose, her white empire dress unstructured, a closed fan resting between her hands.

By 1804 Goya was Madrid's most sought-after portraitist, and here he set aside courtly convention for something far more intimate. Historians have long noted echoes of Rubens's red-haired women and Rembrandt's monumental heroines in her pose and palette — precedents Goya would have studied in the Spanish royal collections — filtered entirely through his own unflinching, modern eye.

Now held in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Bequest of Harry Payne Bingham, 1955), this masterwork is presented here as a premium stretched canvas reproduction, printed on museum-quality matte canvas and hand-wrapped around a sturdy 0.75-inch gallery wrap frame — ready to display and built to last.