The Countess of Chinchón - The Collection - Museo Nacional del Prado
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Goya y Lucientes, Francisco de

Fuendetodos, Zaragoza (Spain), 1746 - Bordeaux (France), 1828

Goya y Lucientes, Francisco de See author's file

The Countess of Chinchón

1800. Oil on unlined canvas.
Room 036

María Teresa de Borbón y Vallabriga was born on the 26th of November 1780 in the family palace of Velada (Toledo). She was the daughter of the infante Luis Antonio de Borbón, brother of King Charles III, and María Teresa de Vallabriga y Rozas, a lady of the lower Aragonese nobility (P007695). She had been excluded from the court since her birth, along with her siblings, the infante Luis María and the infanta María Luisa, and was deprived of the use of her father´s surname by the Pragmatic Sanction of Charles III. When the infante died in 1785, she was sent with her sister to the convent of San Clemente in Toledo. On the 2nd of October 1797 she left that convent to marry Godoy, as decided by decree of Charles IV, who had previously consulted sixteen-year-old Maria Teresa. She agreed a marriage that would restore harmony to the family of the house of Bourbon and reinstate the three brothers and their mother, authorising them to bear the royal surname and titles, and immediately honouring them with others. Thus, she was allowed to bear the titles of Marquise of Boadilla del Monte and Countess of Chinchón. Some years later, in his Memoirs, the Prince of the Peace declared that he had not desired the marriage but had obeyed Charles IV ‘with the same loyalty and submission as in the other acts of my life’. Over the months before and after the portrait, painted in April 1800, Godoy´s letters to the queen and those of Maria Teresa revealed that the couple´s relationship was excellent, and the Prince of the Peace stressed ‘the unalterable gratitude of this marriage, the Girl [the countess] is full of joy’. On the 11th of June 1801, once the War of the Oranges was over, the Countess herself claimed in a letter to the queen that ‘I cannot find a sufficiently satisfactory way of expressing to Your Majesty how grateful I am for the honours you continually bestow upon us [...]. I confess, Madam, that the announcement of peace has caused me excessive joy and I am doubly happy at the way my husband has behaved, and the hope of seeing him soon, for I love him more than myself, to an indescribable degree, and I cannot live without him’.

The correspondence between María Luisa and Godoy between the 22nd of April and early May 1800 was the main source of documentation of the portrait. At that time, the arrangements for Goya to paint the Family of Charles IV (P000726) were coming to an end. The letters reveal that, after two previous failed pregnancies, Maria Teresa was pregnant again, and on this occasion Godoy was sure that everything would end happily ‘as the doctors rarely visit her’. Carlota Luisa de Godoy was born on the 2nd day of October and the king and queen acted as her godfathers. The headdress of the Countess, with its ears of wheat, was in keeping with the fashion for women´s ornaments of those years, which included flowers and fruit. Nonetheless, in this portrait it carries the additional symbolic significance of fertility as an emblem of the goddess Ceres, whose festivities were celebrated in ancient Rome specifically in the month of April. The Countess is wearing an elegant white chiffon dress embellished with small flowers. On her left hand she wears a ring, whose precise, well-defined central brushstroke highlights the brilliance of the diamond. And on the middle finger of her right hand, she wears another ring adorned with a miniature of a very sketchy male portrait –clearly of Godoy, wearing the blue sash of the Order of Charles III.

A technical study of the painting, following its acquisition by the Museum, has revealed that it was painted over a canvas already used by Goya. In this initial canvas, a standing portrait of Godoy and a less visible, underlying portrait of a young knight –who wears the cross of the Order of Saint John of Malta on his chest– can be fully identified in the X-ray radiograph. Both were covered by a pinkish-beige layer, used as preparation for the final portrait of the Countess of Chinchón.

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Technical data

Imagen del carrusel
Imagen del carrusel
Imagen del carrusel
Imagen del carrusel
Inventory number
P007767
Author
Goya y Lucientes, Francisco de
Title
The Countess of Chinchón
Date
1800
Technique
Oil
Support
Unlined canvas
Dimension
Height: 216 cm; Width: 144 cm
Provenance
Palace of Godoy, Madrid, 1800; Depósito General de Secuestros ("almacén de cristales"), December 1813. Countess of Chinchón Palace of Boadilla del Monte (Madrid), 1814. Acquisition for the Prado Museum, with funds from the Legacy of the Villaescusa, 2000.

Bibliography +

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Other inventories +

Inv. Nuevas Adquisiciones (iniciado en 1856). Núm. 2582.

Catálogo Goya, Pierre Gassier y Juliet Wilson. Núm. 793.

Inscriptions +

CC [en el ángulo inferior izquierdo, el monograma 'cc', pintado en blanco, bajo una pequeña corona, correspondiente a los cuadros de la colección de Godoy devueltos a la condesa de Chinchón].
Front, lower left corner

Exhibitions +

Museo del Prado 1819-2019. A place of memory
Madrid
19.11.2018 - 10.03.2019

Historias Naturales
Madrid
19.11.2013 - 27.04.2014

Goya in Times of War
Madrid
15.04.2008 - 13.07.2008

The Spanish Portrait: From El Greco to Picasso
Madrid
20.10.2004 - 06.02.2005

Location +

Room 036 (On Display)

Expuesto
Update date: 26-04-2024 | Registry created on 28-04-2015

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