ABSTRACT
In the Albright Knox sale held by Sotheby’s in New York on 8 June 2008, Lot 270 was Portrait of a Young Woman Holding Two Roses, assigned by the auctioneers to Agustín Esteve y Marqués, following the conclusions drawn by Martin S. Soria in a book published in 1957. 1 Before that book was written, the portrait had been generally considered to be by Goya, and since Soria had admitted that he had never seen the painting itself and only knew it from photographs, his view was clearly open to challenge. I had the good fortune to be able to see the picture in person and study it in detail in 2005, when the then owners had the portrait unhung so that it could be viewed in a variety of lights, close to, and at leisure. It looked to me more like Goya’s work than Esteve’s, and since I had been given a full dossier of the history of the picture and several excellent photographs on the occasion of my visit, I wrote up my conclusions for the owners in imperfect French, adding several references to the standard literature, from published and manuscript sources not previously used by Goya specialists. In the wake of the recent auction, whose conclusions about authorship seem questionable to me, I have revised and reworked my arguments in English, as a tribute to the memory of Professor Ivy McClelland, a great pioneer of the study of eighteenth-century Spanish culture, with the hope that more attention might be paid, in the future, to this extraordinarily attractive and ingenious painting, so that it can perhaps be restored to the Goya canon.
