The Milkmaid of Bordeaux

The Milkmaid of Bordeaux (La lechera de Burdeos) is an oil-on-canvas painting generally attributed to Francisco Goya, made in Bordeaux around 1827, the year before his death; it is in the Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Goya left Spain in 1823 and settled among liberal exiles in Bordeaux, where in his last years he drew and painted ordinary people at their daily work. This is his last known painting of a woman. She sits slightly turned, head lowered, in a white headscarf over brown hair, a shawl of bluish tones flecked with yellow and white crossed over her chest and a black skirt, against a greenish-blue sky. A pitcher brimming with milk stands at lower left. The low viewpoint suggests she is riding a mule or donkey on her delivery round, though neither the animal nor her hands are shown. The type follows a tradition of trade figures that goes back to early 17th-century Italian art.

Its bright colour and short, juxtaposed strokes stand far from the dark, nearly monochrome works of Goya's final years, and some writers see in the shawl the clearest example of his proto-Impressionist handling. That contrast is also why the attribution has been questioned. Juliet Wilson-Bareau, Carmen Garrido and Manuela Mena have doubted the signature incised on the pitcher and suggested Rosario Weiss, daughter of Goya's companion Leocadia Zorrilla, as the painter; critics answer that Rosario was only thirteen in 1827, and most scholars keep the work under Goya's name. The sitter has never been identified.

The first mention of the picture is a letter of 9 December 1829 in which Leocadia offered it to the banker Juan Bautista de Muguiro, a friend of Goya's in Bordeaux, saying Goya had told her not to let it go for less than an ounce of gold; how it came to her is unclear, since Goya's son Javier collected his father's works. It stayed in the Muguiro family and entered the Prado after the death of the third Count of Muguiro in 1945. The canvas measures 74 × 68 cm.