​Berger was wrong. The Nude Maja was painted first, presumably from life. The clothed version followed a few years later. We don’t know who the woman in the paintings is. She may be Pepita Tudó, mistress to Manuel de Godoy, the Spanish prime minister. Or she may be someone else. We do know the work was commissioned by Godoy and hung in his private collection. Back then, before camcorders, cameras and mobile phones, there was no other way to keep a visual record of sexual conquests. You called for an artist if you were not one yourself, your partner disrobed, and after a while (days, weeks or months) you would have the moment or a reconstruction of it preserved.

Goya’s model looks directly at the viewer, unashamed. She is also, and this was a rarity among European nudes, a creature of her time and place. These are not scenes from mythology, not pages from the Bible. The woman who faces us is flesh and blood, a person who has done things in the painter’s world, and one to whom things have been done. From her clothes we can tell she is a member of the lower classes, a maja – hence the name. 

We think we know men. We understand their anatomical obsessions, their exploratory desires. Faced with two similar paintings we naturally assume Goya began with a fully dressed woman and mentally undressed her, peeling back layers of fabric in his mind’s eye. But here our intuitions fail us. What appears to be discovery is actually concealment, an artist trying, with skill and imagination, to draw a veil of modesty over a woman who would rather be naked.

Vulpes Lumin, South or Southwesterly (2018)