The Clothed Maja

The Clothed Maja is an oil painting on canvas by Francisco Goya, the Spanish Romantic painter and printmaker. It was made in Spain and is usually dated to 1800, though a span running on to 1807 has also been used. The canvas is 95 centimetres (3 ft 1 in) high and 190 centimetres (6 ft 3 in) wide — exactly twice as wide as it is tall, a shape built for a body lying down rather than a person standing up. It hangs in the Museo del Prado in Madrid under the inventory number P000741.

It has a twin. La maja desnuda — The Nude Maja — is an earlier painting by Goya, made between 1795 and 1800, showing the same kind of figure in the same reclining pose without clothes. The two canvases match in format and in the body they present. The clothing is the difference, and so the clothing is the subject: everything the later painting has to say, it says through fabric.

The word in the title does most of the work, so it needs unpacking. A maja was a recognisable type of woman in the Madrid of Goya's day: a woman of the city's popular districts who dressed boldly, in a showy local style, and carried herself with matching confidence. She was not a duchess and not a servant; she belonged to the streets and knew it. This mattered because of what a life-size reclining woman on canvas usually was. The accepted form was mythological — a Venus, a goddess, a figure from a safely ancient world. Myth gave the picture a respectable excuse. By painting a maja instead, Goya removed the excuse. His figure wears the clothes of his own city in his own moment. She is a contemporary, not an ancient, and there is no goddess's name to hide behind.

The painting is classed as a portrait, and that word carries a promise: a portrait shows one particular, real person, and the viewer is meant to be able to say who. Here the promise is broken. Nobody knows who the model was. Historians have proposed two names: María Cayetana de Silva, the Duchess of Alba, and Pepita Tudó, the mistress of the powerful minister Manuel Godoy. Neither identification has been proved, and the evidence has never settled. The commissioner — the person who ordered and paid for the painting — is also unknown. So the two most basic questions one can ask of a portrait, who is this and who wanted it, have no answer.

That silence is not just an accident of lost paperwork. The two majas were never publicly exhibited while Goya lived. There is no exhibition catalogue, no reviewer's notice, no letter from a visitor describing them on a wall. Paintings made for public showing generate records; paintings made for a private room generate almost none. One consequence is a question that can no longer be closed: were the clothed and nude versions planned from the start as pendant paintings — a pair made to hang side by side, each completing the other — or were they made separately and only later treated as a pair? Seeing them together feels natural now, but nothing from Goya's hand or lifetime confirms it.

The written record begins abruptly, in 1808, and it begins badly for the paintings' owner. In that year Manuel Godoy — the minister whose mistress is one of the proposed models — fell from power, and King Ferdinand VII seized his property. Officials drew up an inventory, a plain itemised list of what had been taken, and both majas appear on it. That confiscation list is the first certain written mention of either painting anywhere. Whatever their earlier life was — who commissioned them, whose wall they hung on, who was allowed into the room — the record only picks them up at the moment they stopped being private property.

Their public life then ran through institutions rather than admirers. The paintings entered the collection of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, and did so twice. Between 1814 and 1836 the Spanish Inquisition — the Church court that judged offences against faith and morals — sequestered them: it took them out of circulation and held them in its own custody. The clothed version was not spared. It travelled with the nude and was handled as part of the same case, as though the existence of the naked twin implicated the dressed one. Only in 1901 did the two canvases go on display together at the Museo del Prado, where they have hung side by side ever since.

What the canvas itself offers is precise. The extreme width sends the eye travelling along the figure from head to foot, because the painting gives it nowhere else to go: the space above her closes quickly into a dark, shallow ground with no window, no deep room, no view out. Clothing is not decoration here; it is the whole visible subject, exactly as bare skin is the whole visible subject of the twin. And the figure behaves like a portrait — one person, centred, presented at the scale of a real body, looking out as if we should recognise her. The record has never said who she was. Two centuries of looking have not changed that.