Why is Francisco de Goya so difficult to write about? Is it because his oeuvre encompasses everything from official portraiture and altarpieces to private nightmare fantasies and etchings? Or is it because over the course of his long career he addressed—with equally impressive results—such wide-ranging subjects as aristocratic children and the most progressive thinkers in Spain, young women and ancient crones, the horrors of war and piles of produce destined for the kitchen? Or does discussing Goya pose problems because he transformed himself from a rather provincial maker of tight, stylish Rococo pleasantries into one of the most ferocious and “painterly” painters in the history of art? Is it because of the apparent artlessness of his paintings and drawings—the deceptive straightforwardness of touch and composition, and the equally deceptive suppression of chromatic color? Or is it just because he’s so good?

“Goya’s Last Works,” the tightly focused, elegantly selected exhibition at the Frick Collection until mid-May, makes it plain that none of these explanations, however true, is wholly adequate.¹ If all that accounted for the challenge of writing about this elusive master were the breadth of Goya’s subject matter and the dramatic evolution of his approach, then it would be relatively easy to do justice to this small, wonderful survey. It concentrates on limited themes—portraits, self-portraits, exploratory drawings, and bullfights—and on a single period, mainly the years of the painter’s self-imposed exile from Spain, between 1824 and his death in 1828, aged eighty-two. Goya being Goya,