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The Clothed Maja

Artist: Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828)
Date: c. 1800–1807
Dimensions: 95 x 190 cm
Medium: Oil on canvas
Location: Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain

The Clothed Maja is the companion to Goya's Nude Maja: the same woman, in the same pose on the same couch, now wearing a close-fitting white dress, a short golden jacket and a pink sash.

A closer look

Painted a few years after the nude, the clothed version is looser and more colourful in its brushwork, with lively touches in the jacket and the sash that wraps her waist. Her face, with rouged cheeks, seems more made-up and the pose more knowing. Dressed in the fashion of the 'majas', the fashionable working-class women of Madrid, she gazes at us with the same confidence. It is said that the two paintings were once hung so that the clothed version could be swung aside to reveal the nude behind it.

History of the painting

Both Majas are recorded in 1800 in the collection of Manuel Godoy, the powerful chief minister of Charles IV. When Godoy fell from power in 1808 his property was confiscated; from 1814 the two pictures were kept, out of public view, at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, and they came to the Prado only in 1901, where they have hung side by side ever since.

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