Eduardo Rosales (1836–1873) en el Museo del Prado (Eduardo Rosales [1836–1873] in the Prado Museum)

The visitors’ leaflet for this exhibition observes that Eduardo Rosales (1836–73) was “along with Mariano Fortuny, the most influential and prestigious of the Spanish painters at work in the third quarter of the nineteenth century,” and that he achieved a “modernity that was superior to his contemporaries.” The appreciation of Rosales’s work has been critical to understandings of the quality and significance of nineteenth-century painting and drawing in Spain. His oeuvre has been held up as a litmus test of the country’s contribution to artistic modernity, at the very moment when Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet were at their zenith in neighboring France. Any substantial exhibition on Rosales resonates with the most fundamental debates about Spanish nineteenth-century art and its larger European and worldwide importance. That is all the more so when such an exhibition is held at the Prado. On the one hand, the museum is the largest custodian of Rosales’s work; on the other, such an exhibition at the Prado necessarily sits alongside the museum’s overview of nineteenth-century art in Spain, visually interacting with a broader historiography of the period.

Eduardo Rosales (1836–1873) in the Prado Museum marked the 150th anniversary of the painter’s death, just as, in 1973, a large-scale display of his work had celebrated the centenary.‍[1] The 2023 exhibition was more modest than its precursor, and was made up almost entirely of works from the Prado’s own holdings, the only exception being the early oil Don García, Count of Aragon (1857; Royal Collection, Madrid). It pragmatically conjoined a selection of works in the space set aside for temporary displays of the nineteenth century (room 60; fig. 1), with, at a diagonal, the room (61B) permanently dedicated to the artist amid the main nineteenth-century collection.‍[2] The permanent display contains the work that made Rosales’s European name, the history painting The Testament of Isabel the Catholic (1864; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid), which won a medal at Spain’s National Exhibition of 1864. The Testament appeared at the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris and garnered for Rosales the Légion d’Honneur. Rosales conceived the work following a period of study at the national academy of painting, the Royal Academy of San Fernando, which he entered in 1851, and following over six years spent in Rome and Italy beginning in 1857 (time spent in Italy was a rite of passage for many contemporaneous Spanish artists). As early as 1865, Rosales began work on his second large history painting, The Death of Lucretia (fig. 2), which he would send to the National Exhibition, and which is also now housed in room 61B. While the work won a gold medal, it was, to Rosales’s great disappointment, lambasted by many critics. He kept it rolled up in his studio, and only years later was the work purchased by the state. It would be Rosales’s final large-scale canvas. The severe ill-health that had beset him since 1855 took his short, penurious life on September 13, 1873. He died at home in Madrid, on a street named Válgame Dios, “God help me.”‍[3]

Fig. 1, Installation view. Photograph © Museo Nacional del Prado.

Fig. 2, Eduardo Rosales, The Death of Lucretia, 1871. Oil on canvas. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Artwork in the public domain; photograph © Museo Nacional del Prado.

The controversy around The Death of Lucretia fueled the later claim that Rosales was a key exponent of painterly “modernity” in Spain. The loose brushwork that had characterized The Testament is far more rough-edged and sweeping in the later painting. Physical features—such as Collatinus’s stunted foot—are still more blurred and imprecise. In a letter, Rosales famously defended the painting on the grounds that it was “done” (or “made”) even if it was not (in contemporaneous terms) “finished.” That it might be called “incomplete” or a “sketch” was, he claimed, irrelevant to any fair judgement on its quality. It was, in his words, a work of “impression.”‍[4] Some mid-twentieth-century critics connected these remarks to the supposedly defining characteristics of French-style modernism: an emphasis on the medium of paint itself and on the visual impression per se, as evidenced by attention to color and free brushwork at the expense of line. Following the once-standard view, as established by Clement Greenberg and others, such features showed a modern self-awareness of what painting really is. Rosales appeared to be a kind of Spanish equivalent to Manet, Courbet, or even the Impressionists.‍[5]

Such critics were encouraged by other works that Rosales produced later in his career, but never exhibited, notably the work known as Female Nude, or After the Bath (ca. 1869; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid)—on permanent display—and the oil painting Ophelia (fig. 3). The latter resurfaced from the vaults to be included in the 2023 exhibition. It seemed not only to acknowledge the two-dimensional nature of oil painting but also to look forward to the abstracted figurations of Picasso and others in the twentieth century. The composition is all but flat. The image is made predominantly of blotches of color in a limited palette split across two sections of blues and browns with touches of white and pink. In some places, there are squiggly black lines, and nonrepresentational blocks of color. The scrubby outline of a landscape is accompanied by human characters of cartoon-like simplicity. Toward the end of his life, Rosales began to make landscape paintings—some of the spa town of Panticosa where he nursed his health—that appeared to lend further support to such analyses. The 2023 temporary exhibition displayed two such newly acquired paintings, along with a drawing—The Road to Acqua Acetosa (1860; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid)—an aspect of Rosales’s work in which the Prado’s holdings had until then been lacking for historical reasons. The oil painting simply known as Landscape (fig. 4) in some ways echoes Ophelia, with its flattened perspective; rough horizontal strokes of blue sky tinged with pinks; almost outlined trees pushing their branches upwards; and irregular, curvy, scrubby greens and browns that make up the ground. Seemingly, the trend to modernism was also to be found in more obviously finished works. Among these are the blocks of black and brown with an illuminated face that make up the portrait of Rosales’s future wife in Maximina Martínez de Pedrosa Wearing a Black Shawl (fig. 5), included in the temporary space of the 2023 exhibition. Likewise, critics looked to the extraordinary, luminous swathes of bright pinks on pinks in Concepción Serrano (1871; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid [the work is sometimes known by Doña Concepción’s later title, The Countess of Santovenia]). The latter painting belongs with a larger body of work by Rosales: portraits produced on commission following the success of The Testament.

Fig. 3, Eduardo Rosales, Ophelia, ca. 1871. Oil on canvas. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Artwork in the public domain; photograph © Museo Nacional del Prado.

Fig. 4, Eduardo Rosales, Landscape, 1872. Oil on panel. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Artwork in the public domain; photograph © Museo Nacional del Prado.

Fig. 5, Eduardo Rosales, Maximina Martínez de Pedrosa Wearing a Black Shawl, ca. 1867. Oil on cardboard. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Artwork in the public domain; photograph © Museo Nacional del Prado.

Rosales was not thought of as a lone figure in Spanish painterly modernity, but was rather considered part of a broadly, if loosely, articulated narrative arc of the century’s art history. In its outlines, the story was manifest—in the late twentieth century—in the layout of the Casón del Buen Retiro, a building next to the Prado’s main edifice.‍[6] The nineteenth-century collection was previously housed there, oddly separated from Spain’s most celebrated nineteenth-century painter, Francisco de Goya, until its relocation in the main building’s new extension (opened in 2007) alongside the rest of the museum’s display. Rosales and his immediate contemporary Mariano Fortuny were each given substantial space, including works now outside room 61B, such as Ophelia. These two artists were preceded by a large area given over to those seen as Goya’s successors, especially Eugenio Lucas Velázquez, who featured alongside Leonardo Alenza; the near-fantastical landscapist and Lucas’s mentor, Genaro Pérez Villaamil; and, to a lesser extent, Francisco Lameyer. All of these continued Goya’s lineage of anti-academic or nonacademic painting with broad, free brushstrokes; colorism; and vibrant, sometimes grotesque, fantasia. In Lucas, this trend culminated in thick, sculptural lumps of impasto out of which paintings were visibly constructed. Comparing such facture to the way the Impressionists built images out of strokes of light, the influential art historian José Camón Aznar dubbed Lucas’s distinctive technique Instantism, an attempt to capture rapid movement by rendering it concrete.‍[7] Beyond Fortuny and Rosales, the narrative arc of Spain’s most exciting nineteenth-century painting came to its conclusion with the so-called master of light, Joaquín Sorrolla, whose fame spread across the Americas (including the United States) and Europe. Alongside the genealogy of painterly modernism, audiences could also see representatives of more academic painting, then considered to be of intermittent or historical significance. There were representatives of Spain’s long line of history painters and the Ingres-like portraits by Federico de Madrazo, scion of the country’s most powerful—though not necessarily most talented—family of artists.

Fig. 6, Eduardo Rosales, Saint Catherine of Siena Receiving the Stigmata, after Il Sodoma, 1862. Oil on canvas. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Artwork in the public domain; photograph © Museo Nacional del Prado.

Eduardo Rosales (1836–1873) in the Museum of the Prado did not articulate any such potent narrative. In part perhaps, this is a reflection of the modest, pragmatic use of space available to display the painter’s work. In a long Sunday lecture referencing the display, the Prado’s curator of nineteenth-century art, Javier Barón, acknowledged that the artist “is in need of a [full-scale] exhibition.”‍[8] It was perhaps trickier than usual to sequence the images along anything like a narrative or even chronological thread, with some works confined to their home in the permanent room, and the temporary space composed of a mixture of paintings: one from the Royal Collections, eight acquired by the Prado since 2017, and eleven others from the Prado’s existing holdings. The effect in room 60 was something of a fascinating miscellany. Among other things, the display ranged from an early, loose copy of Il Sodoma’s Stigmatization of Saint Catherine (fig. 6) to a drawing of a landscape, another of the massacre of the innocents, and several preliminary studies, through three portraits in oil from 1865 to 1867 and two well-known works from Rosales’s studies in Rome: The Ciociara (ca. 1862; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid) and the incomplete Tobias and the Angel (1858–63; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid). Unlike in 1973, there is no exhibition catalogue, although there is a collection of online resources. In addition to a digital copy of the exhibition leaflet, there is a homepage with images of works by Rosales and links to two videos. One of these is a lecture by Pedro J. Martínez Pedrosa on “Eduardo Rosales on the 150th Anniversary of his Death,” while the other features a recitation of verses by the seventeenth-century Mexican poet Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz in front of The Death of Lucretia.‍[9] Additionally, Barón’s 2023 lecture on Rosales has been uploaded to YouTube.‍[10] All this said, the practical circumstances of the exhibition cannot fully account for its limited resonance, given the exceptional and now enhanced Rosales collection at the Prado’s disposal.

There is a disconnect between the bold claims made for Rosales’s quality and significance as an artist—his “modernity that was superior to his contemporaries”—and the more limited attempt to articulate why his art matters in the exhibition itself and in the relationship between Rosales’s work and the rest of the nineteenth-century section of the Prado. It is felt as much as anything in an absence. The mid-twentieth century account of Spanish artistic “modernity” has fallen from view, but nothing comparably compelling has quite replaced it within the Prado’s walls. There are very good reasons why this has occurred. Like many accounts of non-French art, the old narrative was prone to a catch-22 in which anyone who simply emulated Manet, Courbet, or the Impressionists was a mere imitator of canonical modernism, whereas anyone who departed from them had clearly not met their standard. Such was the fate of Fortuny’s late paintings of light and color, deemed to fall short of Impressionism by having excess detail. There were some efforts to describe a legitimate, distinctively Spanish version of painterly modernism, such as Camón Aznar’s instantismo. But these were underdeveloped and paled before the larger claim that the French masters had defined an art of modern life. In Rosales’s case, critics did not get much beyond identifying supposedly “modern” characteristics in his art and some technical aspects of his own style.

Such constrained efforts to discern a thread of proto-modernism were vulnerable to skeptical historians who, at the time, could seem refreshingly iconoclastic. Notable among them was Xavier Salas, author of the catalogue essay for Rosales’s centenary exhibition in 1973, and, at that time, director of the Prado. Salas denied that Rosales’s attempt to create an “impression” in The Death of Lucretia had anything to do with Impressionism; Rosales was, in Salas’s view, referring to the emotional impact of an historical scene. Salas contemplated After the Bath, with its roughly evoked curved body from behind, thick strokes of pinks and greys across the skin, sketchy dark blocks of a green curtain, brown bench and wall, and smaller stretch of white and grey cloth with a little watery reflection. He saw a sketch that was entirely consistent with widespread academic practice, an early impression that would be worked up into a completed painting.‍[11] Salas’s comments were explicitly influenced by Albert Boime’s then-recent The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (1971).‍[12] Boime’s work contributed to a larger revision of the historiography of nineteenth-century art, of the supposed stark divide between academic and nonacademic practice, of a teleological narrative culminating in modernism, and of dismissals of history paintings and “finished” works.‍[13] Such thoughts influenced a number of Spanish art historians.‍[14]

Salas’s shadow fell long across the 2023 exhibition. The introductory statement on the wall of room 60 proclaimed that Rosales’s trajectory “reveals a modernity that would influence later Spanish painting.”‍[15] But the grounds on which that claim was originally made have been undermined. Several of the labels for works in the temporary space had little to say about their “modernity.” For example, in the label for Maximina Martínez de Pedrosa with a Black Shawl, we are told that “the slightly high-angled view captures the tenderness and familiarity of the artist’s relationship with his model.” The haunting, sketchy image of an empty chair, off-center by an open window in the very heart of the old empire—the Escorial Palace—was described simply as a “study,” “although it has not been possible to associate it with any specific painting.” The label informed its reader of how careful Rosales was in preparing his canvases. The permanent room, home to the history paintings, seems contrastingly confident in its presentation of their value.

Barón’s 2023 public lecture assists the audience by providing insight into the thinking behind the exhibition and some of its labels. Barón declares that the two large history paintings are “Rosales’s most important contribution.”‍[16] The layout of the surrounding rooms appears likewise to take to heart revisionist views of the nineteenth century. Such revisions—offered as an enriching corrective—seem to have effected a significant reversal in some areas of the Prado. Key innovators in free brushwork post-Goya—Lucas and Alenza—have been all but eliminated from the galleries, removing the impression that there is a nonacademic genealogy leading through the century to Rosales and beyond. As a result, history paintings and “finished,” Ingres-like portraits are proportionately more dominant in the art historical story within which the 2023 exhibition was situated. They are accompanied by an extended display of luminous landscapes from the mid-century to the 1880s, especially of the kind championed by the Belgian-born Carlos de Haes, an influential member of the Royal Academy from 1860, in his rejection of more fantastical techniques. Once-iconic works like After the Bath and Ophelia end up in a kind of limbo. They are at once admired—Salas called After the Bath “beautiful,” and Barón terms it a “masterpiece”‍[17]—but no longer deemed so central to Rosales’s artistic project. Barón argues that Ophelia is not an example of modern art, but simply an unfinished piece that Rosales would never have exhibited.

Nonetheless, the 2023 exhibition revealed an incipient effort to reformulate Rosales’s “modernity” within the bounds of Salas’s criticisms. Barón’s lecture gives some substance to this undertaking and serves to explain some labels in the exhibition that might otherwise risk confusion. A case in point is the label for the near abstractions of Ophelia, which emphasized how realistic it was: “the artist used very expressive and synthetic brushstrokes to apply a thin layer of paint, a technique that allowed him to obtain notably realistic atmospheric results.” The Spanish version of the label used the adjective realista, which means both realistic and realist. For Barón, it is realismo (realism) that characterizes Rosales’s innovations. By this, Barón means a combination of synthetic brushstrokes inspired by Diego Velázquez, a similarly velazqueño use of black paint and a concern with atmospherics and dissolving color, combined with some physical characteristics that jarred with idealizations (Barón believes Ophelia’s inflated belly to be due to the effects of drowning). Barón sees these features as consistent with broad trends across mid-century Europe of which Manet and Courbet were only two examples. If Manet and Rosales were similarly inspired by Velázquez, this occurred independently, and they were on distinct artistic paths. In the famous portrait The Violinist Ettore Pinelli (1869; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid)—mainly a dark assembly of sketchy blocks of color verging on a modulated monochrome, the sitter’s face merging and dissolving into the shallow, nondescript backdrop—Barón finds Rosales to be “by now totally realist.” Rosales’s “modernity”—as Barón calls it—is confirmed in the sketchiness of one of the recent acquisitions (on display in the permanent room): the small-scale history painting Doña Blanca of Navarre Handed over to the Captal of Buch (1869; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid) which so offended some contemporaneous critics. With the acquisition of this work, the Prado completed its collection of the four paintings that Rosales sent to the 1871 National Exhibition.‍[18]

Outside Spain, there have been some very rich, very specific accounts of the creative achievements and aesthetic merits of non-French painting and its larger implications for art and culture in the mid-nineteenth century. These newer narratives rest on the rejection of historiographies and aesthetic criteria centered on a small number of French artists (such as Manet and the Impressionists), and on the reevaluation of works that had been consequently underestimated. The profound revisiting of the Pre-Raphaelites in the UK is a major case in point.‍[19] In the same spirit, a number of historians of Spanish culture have sought critically to restate the merits and larger significance of some key nineteenth-century Spanish artists. The thinking that informs the Rosales exhibition has some reminiscences of such an undertaking, while arguably still having some way to go. Realist and realistic are elastic terms, whose usage has been much analyzed, criticized, and discussed. Over the decades, art historians have reached for supplementary ways to frame mid-century art. Michael Fried has, for example, described the “Realist” Courbet in terms of “absorption,” while Klaus Herding has emphasized dreamy and hallucinatory aspects of Courbet’s work.‍[20]

The 2023 exhibition and its supplementary material leave us with pending questions. Why is “realist” an especially apt word to summarize Rosales’s formal techniques, quality, and significance? On what grounds is this “realism” said to demonstrate “modernity”? Is it by some restatement of the claim that Rosales is attentive to the medium of paint itself, or on some other basis? Above all, what specifically is at stake in the “different path” that Rosales is said to have traveled artistically? Why does this “different path” really matter compared to Manet and other major mid-century artists?

We have seen how the significance of Rosales’s broad brushwork and the relative status of his more sketch-like works have been at the heart of debates about the artist. Salas’s long shadow, asking awkward questions about words like sketch and impression, guides Barón’s 2023 exhibition away from pitfalls such as presenting The Death of Lucretia as a work of Spanish Impressionism. But it has generated its own confusions—or at least uncertainties—around such crucial terms as sketch, and these have had large consequences for our appreciation of Rosales’s artistic achievements. In its reframing of Rosales’s art and of the Spanish nineteenth century, revisionism has imported its own assumptions. Two important things might helpfully be acknowledged. First, we do not always know with any certainty where Rosales drew the line between a finished work of art and a preliminary sketch or study. Second, it may not be of crucial importance for appreciating his art. Let us consider the claim that Rosales would never have exhibited Ophelia, that he drew the line at the extent of sketchiness seen in the history paintings presented at the 1871 National Exhibition, and that, if he had considered Ophelia and After the Bath to be full works of art, he would have exhibited them. A choice to send or not send an item to a National Exhibition tells us nothing other than what the artist felt would be a good fit for a particular exhibition. We also cannot, in general, legitimately deduce that an artist did not feel a piece was fully a work of art from the fact that they never exhibited it. Presumably, Salas and Barón have in mind that art theorists in Spain at the time often admitted loose brushwork, but only up to certain acceptable limits that did not violate a sense that the painting was finished. If that was in Rosales’s thoughts in 1871, he evidently misjudged what responses might be and crossed the line many critics typically drew. At all events, Rosales is explicitly clear that he does not think it matters whether a work is “finished.” This means that he was fundamentally at odds with that key criterion about the limits of free brushwork. In the absence of definitive evidence, we are all left to make judgements about how Rosales might have classified specific works. Barón tells us that the magnificent oil landscape of 1872, recently acquired by the Prado and never exhibited by Rosales, was “a foretaste of what the artist would have done had he not died the following year.”‍[21] Given its similarities in composition and execution to Ophelia, it is not clear why the one would best be presented as an excellent example of what Rosales would do next, and the other as a preparatory work. For his part, purportedly looking to historical nineteenth-century practices, Salas classified the much-admired After the Bath as a “sketch.”‍[22] It is over 1.6 square meters in size; that seems quite large for a nineteenth-century sketch for a nude.

In point of fact, Spanish National Exhibitions were open both to sketches and studies. The “painting” section of the exhibition was capaciously conceived and could even include lithographs. In 1871, nine works self-described as sketches were exhibited, as well as eighteen that were presented as studies.‍[23] Assuming that Rosales did think of After the Bath and Ophelia as sketches or studies, he could presumably have submitted them anyway. More to the point, there was no inherent obstacle to his contemporaries judging them to be of artistic value. In his catalogue entry for the massive relaunch of the Prado’s nineteenth-century collection (2007, in collaboration with Barón), the art historian José Luis Díez observed how After the Bath obtained some of the highest bids when Rosales’s work was sold at auction following his death in 1873.‍[24] Indeed, the issue of artistic value is surely critical here. From that perspective, the question is not really whether some of Rosales’s works were sketches and studies. The question is whether—compared to other sketches and studies and to other sketch-like works of the mid-nineteenth century—such works are examples of run-of-the-mill preparatory practice, or whether they are remarkable objects that open up vistas on what art might be. As we have seen in this review, many educated viewers have found works such as Ophelia and After the Bath to exhibit exceptional qualities. True, in many dominant nineteenth-century hierarchies, sketches would have been placed lower down the pecking order. But, of course, aesthetic value and hierarchies of historical relevance are somewhat different matters from each other.

Fig. 7, Eduardo Rosales, Saint Matthew the Evangelist, ca. 1873. Oil on canvas. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Artwork in the public domain; photograph © Museo Nacional del Prado.

The great merit of Eduardo Rosales (1836–1873) in the Prado Museum was simply this: once more, after so long, viewers could assess first hand and for themselves the artist’s achievements from the earliest stage of his career, with the 1857 commission of a figure of antique royalty (Don García Aznar, Count of Aragon) which was to be part of a genealogy of the monarchy, through to a preparatory oil painting of a muscular, Michelangelesque Saint Matthew the Evangelist (fig. 7), part of a project for the frescoes of the Church of St. Thomas (Madrid) that was truncated by the artist’s death that year. (Both these works appeared in the temporary exhibition room.) Such a wide, diverse display was a renewed opportunity and stimulus to ponder the large consequential issues presented by Rosales’s work. As Barón comments in his closing remarks, Rosales’s oeuvre is multifaceted, plural. The history paintings are a minority of his production, and while they are indeed masterpieces, they are rivaled in quality and significance, in their contribution to art, by portraits such as that of Maximina Martínez de Pedrosa with a Black Shawl, by the late landscapes, and by works of less certain classification such as After the Bath.

Important pointers to Rosales’s most profound preoccupations were certainly to be found in the bringing together of Rosales’s history paintings: the two large works, the smaller Presentation of Don Juan of Austria to the Emperor Carlos V in Yuste (ca. 1873; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid), and also the smaller, recently acquired Doña Blanca of Navarre and Queen Doña Juana in the Adarves of the Castle of La Mota (ca. 1873; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid). In both The Testament of Isabel the Catholic and The Death of Lucretia, the composition sets a single dead or dying female figure of momentous historical importance apart from a gathering of predominantly male characters who look either past her or bewilderedly at her. The subject matter recalls not just immediate contemporaneous resonances (the reign of Isabel II, the rise of Spanish republicanism) but the foundational moment of history-defining European empires: those of Spain and Rome, the former an echo of the latter. It is as if the true significance of these women was detached from the male-dominated imperial future of their respective states. It is as if the viewer were invited to reconnect with what was lost, to adopt an alternate kind of gaze, to look into their closed or closing eyes. “Foolish men, you who accuse woman, without reason, without seeing that you are the occasion of the very thing you blame,” begins Sor Juana Inés’s verses recited before The Death of Lucretia, a poignant inclusion among the multimedia resources of the exhibition (though it is curious that the female voice was not given to an actress).‍[25] Citing Lucretia among its examples, the poem denounces male projections and depictions of female virtue and vice that leave women in an impossible, lose-lose situation.

Similarly disruptive compositions, undoing or resisting a violent theatrical action, are to be found in two of the smaller works, as if in an effort to hold out against history’s tide. As other characters gesture for her to move toward her awaiting captor, out of a predominantly female group into a predominantly male one, the Queen of Navarre conceals her eyes, looking down, static. Doña Juana—soon to be declared mad and deprived of her throne—sits off center, turning her eyes in an awkward look back from the horizon towards groups of characters who gesture or gaze insistently at her. In The Presentation, we see a parallel male encounter, disclosing a secret hidden at its heart: between the new Caesar Carlos V and his unacknowledged illegitimate son, Juan of Austria—at Lepanto, the latter would lead the key victory of Roman Catholic powers over the Ottomans, the successors to the Eastern Roman empire of Byzantium. There is an empty expanse between the two groups, and an awkward stillness as Carlos V, whose seated body points away, turns to observe his son. The composition suggests a fundamental emotional lack in the male imperial monarchy that ultimately succeeded Isabel the Catholic’s regime.

The exhibition’s overview of Rosales’s work is suggestive of the important opportunities for the Prado to engage further with debates on gender and on imperialism that have long been critical to discussions of nineteenth-century art and modernity. This is relevant not least to the museum’s ongoing “Prado in the Feminine” project.‍[26] It would be fascinating to see Rosales’s work set beside that of Spanish women artists of the nineteenth century. It is not easy to locate and obtain their production, even though there were numerous such practitioners. In their lectures, Barón and Martínez Plaza highlight the Prado’s efforts to acquire work by Carlota Rosales, the painter’s daughter, who became the first Spanish woman artist to receive a pension to study in Rome.‍[27] It is to be hoped that the Prado will have future successes in acquisition. Perhaps the museum may acquire or at least borrow more by Rosario Weiss, a disciple of Goya who developed a highly independent style not only in portraiture and in the depiction of women’s gaze, but in her looming landscape and nature drawings. Rosales himself is a complex instance for those concerned with gender and imperialism. His visions of women are scarcely free of stereotyping even as they are challenging: Lucretia, for example, exemplifies chaste feminine purity. Likewise, his visions of empire are not exactly anti-imperialist, even as they are critical. Notably, the sketch An Episode from the Battle of Tetuan 1860 (1868; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid), with its advancing flag and triumphant gestures forward, was submitted to a competition in commemoration of Spanish victory; for many Spaniards, the battle against Morocco was the supreme renewal of Spain’s former military glory. Yet at the same time, we see to our right a black Moroccan, his arms outstretched in a gesture reminiscent of crucifixion, his back towards the advancing Europeans. This character is a mirror image of the central figure of Goya’s The Third of May 1808 (1814; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid): a Spanish resistance fighter martyred by the invading French.

Rosales closely associates loose brushwork and masses of color with his invitations to undo or reconfigure history and violent melodrama and to reclaim something beyond the existing patriarchal order. The range of the 2023 exhibition enabled viewers to observe the pattern of such innovations across the span of his production. The effect is reinforced by the associated multimedia material, where other important holdings of the Prado are also highlighted, not least Concepción Serrano and The Violinist Ettore Pinelli, highlighted in Barón’s lecture as key developments in the artist’s portraiture and loaned in 2024 to an exhibition of nineteenth-century Spanish portraiture at CaixaForum in Seville.‍[28] In Isabel the Catholic, vision is blurred and softened; in The Death of Lucretia, the bold brushstrokes evoke the violence around her but conjure a mood of monumental sobriety. Elsewhere, as in the portrait of Concepción Serrano, our vision is dominated by a single soft color that pervades and envelops most of the canvas, intensifying and spreading Goya’s brilliant pinks (see the skirt of Countess of Altamira and Her Daughter, María Augustina [1787–88; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York]). By comparison with these modulations of a single, translucent, at times shimmering, bold color, even Manet’s Young Lady in 1866 (1866; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) seems subdued. Serrano was the daughter of a leading politician who between 1869 and 1871 acted as regent. The painting asserts an alternative sovereignty through her female image by echoing Goya’s composition for the ultimate male authority—the absolutist Fernando VII at an Encampment (after 1815; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid)—and mirroring his iconic depiction in black of The Duchess of Alba (1797; The Hispanic Society of America, New York). In his greatest male portrait, The Violinist Ettore Pinelli, Rosales offers us an intriguing parallel to Concepción Serrano.‍[29] While Pinelli gazes steadily at us and firmly grips his groin-level instrument—as if maintaining his masculinity—he is softened by his dissolution into the near monochrome of the canvas, by the dissipation of his outline, and by the merging of his face smokily into shadow. The contrast with Courbet’s apparently similar The Cellist (Self-Portrait) (1847; National Museum, Stockholm) is telling. Where Courbet—“the most arrogant man in France”—evokes creativity as unkempt, intense forcefulness,‍[30] Rosales offers an alternate, authoritative masculine artistry: the dispersal of paint into gentle, near-monochrome modulations.

The facture and composition of the late works Ophelia and After the Bath provide an alternative to and deflection from the sexually idealizing gaze on women’s bodies. The rough, pink-grey brushstrokes and flesh tones of After the Bath are subtly at odds with the illuminated, near-white, smooth flesh of so many European nudes that were intended to allure. It undoes the genre from within. As Barón observes, Rosales’s naked, drowned Ophelia contrasts with the many beautified depictions of her in the nineteenth century, such as John Everett Millais’s famous eponymous painting (1851–52; Tate, London). Rosales’s Ophelia is a small female shape, greyish white and near featureless against a desolate landscape. The painter depicts her pregnant, as some readings of Hamlet imply: maternity driven to suicide. The rough swathes of limited color that make up the landscape, with only occasional and leafless trees, and the rigid poses of the little characters, avoid the dynamic action of passionate melodrama. We are left with a stark, imposing, sober melancholy. In this spirit, our eyes are drawn to a woman’s mortal end in the crucified shape of the corpse, somewhat brighter than the rest of the image. Ophelia’s body is at once the consequence of the drama’s unfurling action, but also a sign of resistance to it. Beyond such more obviously gendered scenes, the late landscapes likewise contribute to Rosales’s undermining—or at least reconfiguration—of the notion that art is an expression of wild emotion, violent drama, or overwhelming forcefulness. In the eyes of many contemporaries, the fate of landscape painting was tied to that of Spain, in part because it literally showed the land, but also because the rising prestige of the genre meant its success or failure was a matter of rivalry with other nations.‍[31] The recently acquired landscape in oils of 1872 breaks up the dynamic flow and movement of energetic nature and light, the sensation of being projected through sensual matter, whether of the world or of paint. The large but nuanced blocks of color are made up of visible strokes of paint, finely and visibly textured by the artist’s instrument. The mainly horizontal swathes of sky are cut across by the vertical thrust of the two stark trees, while the largely barren ground offers an irregular myriad of lines of paint in multiple directions. It is a subtly imposing and melancholy scene of light and paint.

Rosales conceived his artistry as an exploration and revitalization of Spain’s art history in dialogue with trends from elsewhere, such as Ingres’s portraiture, that linked the peninsula to the rest of contemporary Europe. Barón’s lecture aptly highlights Rosales’s frequent reference both in technique and composition to Diego Velázquez and his successor Goya, and precociously, through one figure in The Presentation of Don Juan of Austria, to El Greco. In the latter painting, Barón notes, there is an allusion to the Prado itself through the selection of images on the rear wall. Certainly, the situation of the present-day nineteenth-century galleries in the main Prado building, and of the temporary exhibition within those galleries, lent some assistance to the viewer in appreciating such connections. Not only did the works on display share an edifice with Velázquez, but, like the rest of the nineteenth-century collection, they now found themselves in proximity to Goya; this was quite a different experience to seeing such an exhibition in the Casón. The nearby spaces dedicated to history paintings and to numerous, somewhat clone-like portraits by Federico de Madrazo and to de Haes’s landscapes, enabled comparisons to be made between Rosales’s echoes of such European trends and his creative departures from them, inspired by his understanding of Velázquez and Goya. With honorable exceptions, the points of comparison underlined the gap in quality and significance between Rosales’s creations and those kinds of painting. In that respect, the older view of nineteenth-century Spanish art history was not so very wrong. Undoubtedly, the Prado has an unenviable task in making selections for its permanent display, given that the nineteenth-century collection is its largest. But it is reasonable to wonder whether an overcorrection is now an obstacle to showing more works of genuine quality—among them more images by Rosales—and to deselecting some of the less inspiring objects.

Proto-modernist narratives about Spanish nineteenth-century art were certainly flawed. Yet so too is the revisionism that sought to replace them. Its own narrative skew seems especially apparent in the downplaying of Lucas and Alenza. Their relative absence in the rooms surrounding the Rosales exhibition altered the impression of that artist’s creative relationship to Spanish art history and of what was at stake in that relationship. Many educated Spaniards of the nineteenth century adopted a radically historicized view of subjecthood and creativity. Broadly put, they envisaged these as constituted—and continually reconstituted—out of reconfigured historical material. The dialogism that Janis A. Tomlinson identified in Goya—the complex conversations he stages with and between other and earlier artists‍[32]—reappears in Lucas as bewildering, disorienting assemblies of pastiche. Our (art) historical existence becomes radically unstable and dislocated, seen through an unsettled gaze. Lucas’s mentor and friend, the landscapist Villaamil—somewhat better represented in the present-day Prado—pursued his own choral notion of art as friendship in conversation, of critical dialogue with Spanish and foreign images of his country, a vision on which Lucas drew and from which he departed. When Rosales traces a way back to where history might have traveled a different path, when he associates this with his own reworked version of Velázquez and Goya, he is responding to a question that fascinated these nineteenth-century artists. How can we constitute a free, creative self out of the materials of history from which we are made?

The full sense of Rosales’s response would be more apparent if viewers were better able to contrast his version of velazqueño and goyesque loose brushwork to that of these nineteenth-century predecessors. For many educated nineteenth-century Spaniards, the bold creativity of their ancestors was double-edged: it could condemn Spaniards to dangerous, violent irrationality as easily as it could speak to their love of true freedom. In Villaamil, creative liberty is expressed in a fantasia of brushwork that transfigures physical landscapes into playful spectacles of unreal optics and light. Often in Lucas, the wild accumulation of sculpted lumps of impasto composes and decomposes the image before our eyes, unbridling even Goya’s liberties, just as his pile-up of pastiche intrigues and disorientates the viewer. Fantasia at once explodes and implodes in his paintings. Where Lucas toys with escape from such untamed sublimity—notably in two early landscapes belonging to the Prado, but not on view‍[33]—he offers up a desultory banality populated by little humans, a world bereft of the significance even of despair. In his genre painting, Alenza had earlier continued Goya’s ventures into the rough-and-ready world of the poor. His rough, thick brushstrokes conjure a delicate balance between the realistic and the caricatural, just as Villaamil’s fantasias occupy a liminal space at the edge of physical reality. The visible medium of paint acts like a filter, offering distance without abandoning all sympathy. As Barón notes, when Rosales turns to Velázquez and Goya, he looks instead to synthetic strokes of paint and dissolving atmospherics. Yes—and Rosales does so because he seeks an intense creative freedom uncompromised by the disturbances and grotesques of dynamic fantasia, less still by the point of collapse that Lucas contemplated. Rosales attempts to reconstitute the materials of history so as to attain the far reaches of imaginative liberty without sacrificing sanity and sobriety in the process. He is seeking a path of recovery from dangerous violence and excess force into a truer creative freedom. In the coming decades, the question of how to do so would be central to what some Spaniards called “realism.”‍[34]

Eduardo Rosales (1836–1873) in the Prado Museum took audiences to the heart of nineteenth-century Spanish art history by offering a rare, wide-ranging overview of one of the period’s finest artists, enhanced by new acquisitions. It reminded the public of both the Prado’s special role as a custodian of Rosales’s oeuvre and the artist’s critical importance in debates on the historiography and aesthetic value of nineteenth-century Spanish art. The issue at stake was—as often—framed in terms of the artist’s “modernity.” The limits to the resonance of the exhibition brought into relief the impasse at which the museology of the period appears to have arrived in this respect. The false dilemma between an older, proto-modernist historiography of the century and a revisionist alternative has led at times to confusions in terminology and to something of a state of limbo. The quality and significance of Rosales’s work are apparent and affirmed, but the grounds for that judgment are no longer quite so clear. In general, across the nineteenth-century collections, an overcorrection may have sometimes come at the expense of works of genuine value. The hugely successful integration of the nineteenth century into the Prado’s main displays, on an equal footing with the rest of history—and the flow of visitors that comes with that—provides a stimulating catalyst to look beyond the historiographic impasse. The museum’s capacity to present the range of an artist such as Rosales, and the flexibility provided by the temporary display room, offer encouragements to bold curatorship. Spanish nineteenth-century artists raised large issues concerning the relationship between aesthetics and such pressing concerns as gender and imperialism. These themes could readily be foregrounded. Rosales himself sought to recast defining points of interplay between creativity, power, and patriarchy amid the remnants of an empire that had violently reshaped the world. The potential to highlight connections across a more diverse range of artists is indicated by the Prado’s efforts in the acquisition and display of Carlota Rosales’s work. The exhibition’s inclusion of a few of Eduardo Rosales’s drawings—so admired in his time—hints at the possibility of another kind of diversity: a greater acknowledgement of the nineteenth-century’s varied visual arts across the galleries, such as the nearby Reina Sofía Museum has pioneered for art since Picasso, and as Barón has highlighted in the nineteenth-century portraiture exhibition at the CaixaForum in Seville.‍[35]

Above all, beyond now-sterile historiographic frameworks, lies the opportunity to explore confidently the aesthetic achievements of the century, its wrestling with its own radically historical condition, and its quests for a viable form of creative freedom.