Maja and Celestina (Maja y celestina)

Just as Gudiol tells us, both this canvas and Maja and Two Majos may have been experiments for cartoons or even finished cartoons which the Royal Textile Factory of Santa Bárbara, for which Goya worked, either did not accept or never used.

A young woman, wearing a low-cut dress and reclining on a rock in a natural setting, looks out at the viewer, lost in thought. She appears to be turning a deaf ear to the advice of the aged procuress who sits behind her, wearing a scarf on her head.

The theme of prostitution, implicit in this work, would later be dealt with by Goya in some of the etchings in the artist's Caprices series (no. 14, A pretty piece of advice and no. 17, It is nicely stretched). It also appears in Album B or the Sanlúcar-Madrid Album (1796), which includes the scene entitled Maja and Celestina Waiting Underneath an Arch. The artist would also return to the subject of the maja and her celestina in a canvas painted several years later.