#women

Supposedly the commission was turned down flat at first, and only accepted after an actual meeting with her — then it dragged on for something like a decade, with a whole second painting of her finished years after this one. Nobody, it seems, was in any hurry.

The museum doesn't seem certain this is actually his. There's a very close version of the same scene elsewhere and, from what I've read, people have argued for a century about which came first and who painted which. The two young women are majas — a working-class Madrid style that rich families copied.

From what I've read this comes from his last couple of years out in the Pacific, when he was ill, broke and permanently at war with the local officials. The story where a man walks away from Europe and finds paradise doesn't survive much reading.