Goya's final flowering: the Frick is displaying Goya's late work in unprecedented depth. The rich display of his little-known miniatures on ivory is especially rewarding

Apollo, May, 2006 by Juliet Wilson-Bateau

The presentation of 'Goya's Last Works' at the Frick Collection offers a subdued but uniquely enlightening experience. This is the first time that late works have been seen grouped together in such numbers. They span Goya's last four years in Spain, from 1820 to 1824, and the final four spent in self-imposed exile in France, principally in Bordeaux, until his death there in 1828 at the age of 82.

The key and chronologically pivotal work is the Frick's own Portrait of a Lady (Fig. 3) dated 1824, and identified (although without proof) in 1916 as Maria Martinez de Puga, a young woman perhaps related to the Don Dionisio Antonio de Puga who acted as a witness for Goya in Madrid in the year the portrait was painted. Whether the encounter between artist and sitter took place in Madrid or after Goya's departure for France in June that year remains a mystery, since no further proposals have been put forward to resolve the identity of the woman. The portrait, a broadly handled, almost monochrome masterpiece in black, white and grey, demonstrates the artist's astonishing modernity, and his skill and sensitivity as a portraitist, a talent amply confirmed by other canvases in the show.

The works in the exhibition were painted after a near encounter with death in 1819, following the execution of Goya's final altarpiece, the monumental and deeply moving Last Communion of San Jose de Calasanz for a chapel in Madrid. Goya's miraculous salvation from an 'acute and dangerous illness' is recorded in a closely related and equally moving Self-Portrait with Dr Arrieta (no. 3). This 'rebirth' of the artist in 1820 was followed by a series of brilliantly characterised likenesses of friends in Madrid, Paris and Bordeaux, which make up the bulk and possibly the totality of Goya's surviving paintings on canvas in these years. The superbly constructed portraits, in which sombre black, blue-black and grey or greenish tonalities are set off by white and occasional vivid touches of red and yellow, are very difficult to reproduce. The handsome, lavishly illustrated catalogue goes a long way toward conveying the quality of works that cry out for direct experience.

To grasp the nature of the late paintings, it is essential to see them dearly for what they are, both technically and as works of art. Painted on Goya's visit to Paris in June-July 1824 but only recently brought into view, Joaquin Mafia de Ferrer (no. 8) and Manuela de Alvarez Coinas y Thomas (no. 9) are wonderfully fresh (though the wife needs a little facial conservation). Yet their reticence, modesty and gravitas led a New York critic to dismiss them as 'clunky' and 'lifeless'. Such portraits reveal the artist's subtly nuanced sensitivity to each sitter, supported by brilliantly simple compositional devices that lead the eye, as Eleanor Sayre always noted, straight to the head.

The authors of the catalogue, Jonathan Brown and Susan Grace Galassi, who are not Goya specialists, have amassed an impressive amount of documentation and opinion, and offer many interpretations and opinions of their own. They have preferred to create 'a "biographical" exhibition' and 'not to engage in current debate over the attribution of some of the later works', apart from the contentious Milkmaid of Bordeaux (no. 12), which in my judgment now falls within the exclusion zone for works attributed to Goya. They do not mention in this context the problematic Silvela portrait (no. 11), which gives this reviewer the impression of a pastiche of disparate elements drawn from different periods but consistent with none. If Goya's work is to be understood in relation to his life, we have to be satisfied that what is said to have issued from his brush or crayon is indeed by him and not a long-accepted but uninspired lookalike by a contemporary, or one of the 'fringe works'--copies, imitations, even fakes--that appeared disturbingly soon after Goya's death and have bedevilled the clear appreciation of his art.

Besides the unquestioned and clearly documented paintings, it is the album drawings and the etchings that offer essential guides to attribution. Goya's late etchings--the aquatinted originals, not their spurious imitations in etching only on the verso of the three known plates--would have been welcome here, particularly since two of the catalogued drawings, nos. 29 and 45 (Fig. 2) relate to them. The inclusion of the smaller Bordeaux lithographs would also have contributed, together with the etchings and drawings, to a clearer understanding of the impressively large group of miniatures in the show.

We know from Goya's own testimony in a letter to Ferrer in Paris that he painted some 40 experimental miniatures on ivory over the winter of 1824-25. Laurent Matheron, Goya's first biographer, was given an account of his working methods by Antonio Brugada, the young Spanish artist who helped to look after the aged Goya in Bordeaux. According to Brugada, the miniatures were created from random shapes, formed when water was dropped onto a blackened plaque of ivory, which Goya then exploited to form capricho-like images. We can see that he used a brush with ink and touches of watercolour, and wiped or scraped through to the pale, translucent ivory to create highlights.