Eduardo Rosales (1836–1873) at the Prado

Museo Nacional del Prado. Madrid 7/3/2023 - 10/27/2024

In Room 60 of the Villanueva Building, a space dedicated to showcasing the museum’s nineteenth-century collections, this tribute to Eduardo Rosales features seventeen works by the artist. Some are recent additions to the Prado’s holdings, and others are not regularly on display. The exhibition, on view until 27 October 2024, also includes paintings from the permanent collection in Room 61 B, the Rosales gallery, and Room 101, devoted to the history of the museum, where The Salón del Prado and the Church of San Jerónimo is displayed.

Through a selection of his finest works, this presentation offers insight into the artist’s creative personality, evolution and approach to different genres, revealing a modern spirit that would influence later Spanish painters.

The works assembled in Room 60 illustrate Rosales’s early interest in the Renaissance masters, whom he studied carefully during his long sojourn in Italy. His dedication to portraiture is particularly evidence in likenesses of his relatives. And his landscapes and studies related to history paintings (The Castle of La Mota, The Hall of Constantine in the Vatican) and literature (Ophelia) attest to an increasing tendency towards simplification.

Curator:: Francisco Javier Barón Thaidigsmann, Senior Curator of Nineteenth-Century Painting at the Museo Nacional del Prado

Access

Room 60, 61B and 101 . Villanueva Building

Hazte Amigo

RDF

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Exhibition

The exhibition

The year 2023 marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Eduardo Rosales (1836–1873), who rivalled Mariano Fortuny as the most influential and prestigious Spanish painter active in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The Prado owns the largest and finest collection of Rosales’s works anywhere in the world, comprising over one hundred drawings and twenty-six paintings. Eleven of them, including the history paintings for which he was most renowned, are normally exhibited in Room 61 B, and another, The Salón del Prado and the Church of San Jerónimo, occupies Room 101, whose theme is the museum’s history.

A visit to these galleries rounds out the exhibition now being presented in Room 60, where the majority of the works are recent gifts and bequests. The presentation includes pieces not usually displayed with the museum’s permanent collection, most of which were restored for this occasion.

Carmen Sánchez’s bequest allowed the museum to acquire and recover two history paintings whose whereabouts had long been a mystery—Princess Blanche of Navarre handed over to the Captal de Buch and Queen Joanna on the Ramparts of the Castle of La Mota—and the still lesser-known study of The Hall of Constantine in the Vatican, preparatory material for John of Austria’s Presentation to Emperor Charles V in Yuste. The Prado was also able to buy the oil sketch of the artist’s last major history painting, Death of Lucretia, thereby completing its almost exhaustive collection of Rosales’s finest masterpieces in this genre, the most important and significant of his career, with which he enjoyed great success at the 1867 Paris Exposition.

The two most recent donations, Landscape and the portrait of María Isabel Manuel de Villena, 9th Countess of La Granja de Rocamora, are now being exhibited for the first time.