Queen María Isabel of Braganza | Founder of the Museum del Prado

María Isabel of Braganza was born in Lisbon on 19 May 1797, daughter of John VI of Portugal and Carlota Joaquina of Spain.

She became queen of Spain when she married her uncle, Ferdinand VII, on 28 September 1816 and became his second wife.

She died during childbirth in Aranjuez on 26 December 1818.

It must be noted that this is a posthumous portrait.

The artist was the son of Vicente López and his most faithful disciple.

Bernardo López Piquer (1801-1874) | Maria Isabel of Portugal in front of the Prado in 1829 | Museo del Prado

Fernando Yáñez de la Almedina | Saint Catherine, 1510 | Museo del Prado

This is one of the Spanish Renaissance's most emblematic depictions of a female figure and the best known of Yáñez de la Almedina’s works.

Both considerations are due to the visibility this work has received at the Museo del Prado, where it has been one of the essential icons in its galleries of 16th-century Spanish painting ever since it arrived in 1946.

María Luisa de la Riva (1865-1926)

María Luisa de la Riva y Callol de Muñoz (1865-1926) was a Spanish painter.

Riva y Callol de Muñoz was born on 4 April 1865 in Zaragoza, Spain. She studied with Ricardo Bellver and Antonio Pérez Rubio.

She was married to fellow painter Domingo Muñoz.

She exhibited regularly at the Exposiciones Nacionales de Bellas Artes where she won medals in 1897, 1901 1887, and 1895.

Riva y Callol de Muñoz exhibited her work at the Woman's Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois and she also exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in 1889.

Vicente Palmaroli | Summer Days, 1885

Sitting near the seashore, a lady puts her reading aside for a moment to turn and look out at the spectator.

Despite her location out on the beach, she wears a long purple skirt with splendid black lace decoration, a white pinafore, a comfortable shawl and a hat with blond lace and feathers.

In her hand she holds a small parasol. She appears to have settled comfortably and sits at a distance from the other holiday-makers and next to a number of rush-bottomed chairs (for resting by the sea), other useful beach items, and a few articles of clothing.

Reserved, reading and surprised in her solitude, there is a melancholic, refined air about this female holiday-maker that is greatly in keeping with both the tastes of the European upper-middle class of the last quarter of the 19th century and a stereotype of bourgeois femininity well-known through literature and reflected in a perfectly defined type of art.

Francisco Goya | La duquesa de Abrantes, 1816

Doña Manuela Isidra Téllez-Girón y Alonso de Pimentel (1793-1838) era la figlia minore dei Duchi di Osuna (P00739) e sorella della Marchesa di Santa Cruz, anch'essa ritratta da Goya.

Nel 1813 sposò Don Ángel María de Carvajal y Fernández de Córdoba y Gonzaga (1793-1839), futuro VIII Duca di Abrantes (1816).

Come il resto dei suoi fratelli, ha ricevuto un'educazione illuminata dalla sua famiglia e tra i suoi hobby c'erano la musica ed il canto, come rivela Goya nel suo ritratto attraverso la partitura musicale.