One of the most impressive paintings that will catch your eye when you visit the Carmen Thyssen Museum in Málaga is this completely relaxed "Maja with a Small Dog". It was painted in 1865 by the madrileño Eugenio Lucas Velázquez (1817–1870), one of the most popular artists of the Spanish Romantic period who is widely considered the finest successor to Goya.
Undoubtedly, Eugenio Lucas Velázquez is paying homage to Goya's masterful work, the Maja, of which there are two versions, one clothed and one nude. Eugenio preferred the clothed Maja to the nude Maja, which allowed him to tell a much fuller story.
At the beginning of the 19th century, Romanticism emerged as a reaction to the rationalism of the academic Neoclassical movement. It was a time when Spanish intellectuals were striving to modernise their society and forge a national identity distinct from that of their European neighbours.
The maja and her style of dress were revolutionary for the time, challenging the traditional attire worn by women in the 18th and 19th centuries. The maja dress was characterised by its simplicity and practicality, as well as its richness of colour and decorative flair.
It challenged conventional notions of femininity and fashion in Spanish society, becoming a powerful symbol of national identity and cultural pride. Because the dress was closely associated with the Spanish working class, particularly the residents of Madrid, members of the middle and upper classes adopted the style to connect with the common people and signal their support for the growing nationalist movement.
Eugenio Lucas Velázquez became renowned for his picturesque scenes of elegantly dressed majas displaying their skills in artful flirtation, if not shameless provocation. Apart from this specific painting, his other works typically depict majas in pairs on balconies, in bullrings, or alongside their male counterparts, the majos.
These charming representations of national identity in easel-sized paintings brought him immense success with his clientele. This painting represents the culmination of his oeuvre, standing as the most ambitious and spectacular of the artist's known examples in this genre.
