Goya's final flowering: the Frick is displaying Goya's late work in unprecedented depth. The rich display of his little-known miniatures on ivory is especially rewarding

The presentation of 'Goya's Last Works' at the Frick Collection tenders a subdued but uniquely enlightening experience. This is the first time that late works have been seen clustered together in such numbers. They span Goya's last four years in Spain, from 1820 to 1824 and the final four exhausted in self-imposed exile in France, principally in Bordeaux, until his death there in 1828 at the age of 82

The lock opener and chronologically pivotal work is the Frick's hold Portrait of a Lady (Fig. 3) dated 1824 and identified (although without proof) in 1916 as Maria Martinez de Puga, a young woman perhaps related to the Don Dionisio Antonio de Puga who acted as a witness for Goya in Madrid in the year the portrait was painted. Whether the rencounter between artist and sitter took place in Madrid or after Goya's departure for France in June that year remains a mystery, since no further proposals have been bring forward to resolve the identity of the woman. The portrait, a broadly handled, almost monochrome masterpiece in black, white and grey demonstrates the artist's astonishing modernity, and his skill and sensitivity as a portraitist, a talent amply confirmed by means of other canvases in the show

The works in the exhibition were painted after a near rencounter with death in 1819, following the execution of Goya's final altarpiece, the monumental and to [i]or[/i] at a great depth moving Last Communion of San Jose de Calasanz for a chapel in Madrid. Goya's miraculous salvation from an 'acute and dangerous illness' is recorded in a closely related and equally moving Self-Portrait with Dr Arrieta (no. 3) This 'rebirth' of the artist in 1820 was followed by dint of a series of brilliantly characterised likenesses of friends in Madrid, Paris and Bordeaux, which make up the magnitude and possibly the totality of Goya's surviving paintings upon canvas in these years. The superbly builded portraits, in which sombre black, blue-black and grey or greenish tonalities are station off by white and occasional vivid touches of r and golden are very difficult to generate The handsome, lavishly illustrated catalogue goe a lengthy way toward conveying the quality of works that make an outcry out for direct experience.

To grasp the nature of the late paintings, it is essential to diocese them dearly for what they are, one as well as the other technically and as works of art. Painted upon Goya's visit to Paris in June-July 1824 on the contrary only recently brought into view, Joaquin Mafia de Ferrer (no. 8) and Manuela de Alvarez Coinas y Thomas (no. 9) are wonderfully recent (though the wife needs a little facial conservation). at the same time their reticence, modesty and gravitas l a novel York critic to dismiss them as 'clunky' and 'lifeless'. of that kind portraits reveal the artist's subtly nuanced sensitivity to each sitter, supported by dint of brilliantly simple compositional devices that lead the organ of sight as Eleanor Sayre always noted, straight to the head.

The authors of the catalogue, Jonathan Brown and Susan Grace Galassi, who are not Goya specialists, have amassed an impressive amount of documentation and opinion, and proffer many interpretations and opinions of their hold They have preferred to create 'a "biographical" exhibition' and 'not to engage in rife debate over the attribution of a certain number of of the later works', apart from the contentious Milkmaid of Bordeaux (no. 12) which in my wisdom now falls within the exclusion band for works attributed to Goya. They do not mention in this words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following the problematic Silvela portrait (no. 11) which gives this reviewer the impression of a pastiche of disparate ultimate parts drawn from different periods on the contrary consistent with none. If Goya's work is to be understood in relation to his life, we have to be satisfied that what is said to have issued from his brush or crayon is indeed by means of him and not a long-accepted on the other hand uninspired lookalike by a contemporary, or individual of the 'fringe works'--copies, imitations, plane fakes--that appeared disturbingly soon after Goya's death and have bedevilled the clear appreciation of his art.

Besides the unquestioned and clearly documented paintings, it is the album drawings and the etchings that tender essential guides to attribution. Goya's late etchings--the aquatinted originals, not their spurious imitations in etching sole on the verso of the three known plates--would have been welcome here, particularly since sum of two units of the catalogued drawings, nos. 29 and 45 (Fig. 2) relate to them. The inclusion of the smaller Bordeaux lithographs would also have contributed, together with the etchings and drawings, to a clearer understanding of the impressively large clump of miniatures in the show

We know from Goya's hold testimony in a letter to Ferrer in Paris that he painted a certain number of 40 experimental miniatures on ivory above the winter of 1824-25. Laurent Matheron, Goya's first biographer, was given an account of his working [i]modus operandi[/i]s by Antonio Brugada, the young Spanish artist who helped to gaze after the aged Goya in Bordeaux. According to Brugada, the miniatures were created from random shapes, formed when water was dropp onto a blackened plaque of ivory, which Goya then exploited to form capricho-like images. We can diocese that he used a brush with ink and touches of watercolour, and wiped or scraped from one side to the pale, translucent ivory to create highlights.