He is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and throughout his long career was a commentator and chronicler of his era. Immensely successful in his lifetime, Goya is often referred to as both the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns. He was also one of the great portraitists of his time. Goya was born to a lower-middle-class family in , in Fuendetodos in Aragon. He married Josefa Bayeu in ; their life was characterised by an almost constant series of pregnancies and miscarriages, and only one child, a son, survived into adulthood.

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For most of us, it is almost impossible to comprehend the ferocity and regularity with which life was upended during the first half of the 20th century. Plague and conflict emerged on an epic scale, again and again. Loss and restriction were routine; disaster was its own season. At , Naomi Replansky, a poet and labor activist, has endured all of it. The Spanish flu, which claimed tens of millions of lives, many of them children under the age of 5, was hardly an isolated public health emergency. Polio had been designated an epidemic in New York in June of That year 2, people died of the disease in the city. Of those who lived, many would have had all too vivid memories of the typhoid eruption that gripped the city nine years earlier. Until a polio vaccine came into use in the s, outbreaks occurred somewhere in the country nearly every spring. Public gatherings were regularly canceled; wealthy people in big cities left for the country.
The Nude Maja was the first in a two painting series, the second of which was The Clothed Maja, respectively. It is said to be the first painting in which female pubic hair is visible, making it totally profane at the time. Many art historians agree that the model was a compilation of many female figures. It portrays a nude woman reclining on a bed of pillows, and was probably commissioned by Manuel de Godoy, to hang in his private collection in a separate cabinet reserved for nude paintings. Goya created a pendant of the same woman identically posed, but clothed, known today as La maja vestida The Clothed Maja ; also in the Prado, it is usually hung next to La maja desnuda. The subject is identified as a maja based on her costume in La maja vestida.