The Duchess of Alba came from an ancient, influential and very wealthy family. Her husband, the Duke of Alba, was pampered, inert, but very educated, fond of music. To his willful, energetic, passionate wife, he looked like a capricious child, indulgently forgiving her all her quirks and treason.
Cayetana was very beautiful and shone at the court, was closely accepted by the royal family of Carlos IV. From the very first meeting Goya fell in love with the young duchess, the love was mutual and passionate.
By the way, now there are talks that it is a legend that Feuchtwanger, who wrote the famous book “Goya or a hard way of knowing” invented this love, that it could not have been such a beauty, a spoiled aristocrat to fall in love with a clumsy, artist. But the ways of love are inscrutable, and so far no one has denied the opposite.
Goya wrote many times to Cayetan and he did not like any portrait of him, he still could not catch, to convey in the image that zest, the dash that would show the real Cayetan Alba.
In this portrait, Goya portrayed the duchess in the background of nature. Carefully and meticulously he wrote out the landscape, but in such a way that he did not catch the eye, but only Cayetan remained. She stands proud and fragile, with unbelievably arched eyebrows under the black waves of hair, in a white dress with a high waist, covered in red scarves and with a red bow on her chest. And before her – ridiculous, to absurdity a tiny white shaggy dog with the same ridiculous little red bow on the back foot. Cayetan points down with an elegant finger, where words are written with the letters “Goya-Cayetana Alba” turned towards her, and this gesture as if hints that Goya himself is also something like this funny dog for her.
Goya never managed, in his opinion, to reflect in the portrait that inner fire, the contradictory nature of her character, which so attracted her and at the same time repelled and alarmed her.
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