Fortuny’s sudden death left this painting unfinished, yet it remains one of his finest pieces, and the maximum expression of the audacious pictorial modernity that characterizes his mature work.

The two children that appear in this canvas are the artist’s own son and daughter, Mariano and María Luisa. They rest on the long divan in the Japanese Room at Villa Arata, the Fortuny family’s summer residence in Portici. This smooth-walled room was decorated exclusively by the branch of a flowering tree with butterflies. Little Mariano, who was only three at the time, is practically nude -he wears a mask on his head and is covered with a silk blanket. María Luisa lies on large pillows, cooling herself with a fan.

Fortuny began work on this painting during his last summer in Portici with the idea of giving it to his father-in-law, the great painter, Federico de Madrazo. It was thus an intimate family work from painter to painter. That explains the exquisite essence of its quality as pure painting in which Fortuny expresses himself with absolute freedom. This canvas clearly shows the decisive influence that Japanese esthetics had on Fortuny in his final years. The play of horizontal and vertical lines in a composition whose extreme elegance is due, in part, to its markedly horizontal format, the different flat planes of color on the room’s walls and floor and the inclusion of decorative elements such as the butterflies and fan, exemplify the influence of Japanese art on Fortuny. His superb graphic sense is clear on the left, as is his extraordinary mastery of the brush, which allows him to achieve astonishingly modern qualities in his rendering of the wall in the back, and to contrast it with the exacting and precise volume of the small and fragile figures of the children, totally enveloped in the pictorial unfolding of their set-like surroundings (Text drawn from Barón, J.: El siglo XIX en el Prado, Museo del Prado, 2007, pp. 308-309).