Francisco Pradilla y Ortiz - Queen Juana Confined at Tordesillas with Her Daughter [1906]

Francisco Pradilla y Ortiz - Queen Juana Confined at Tordesillas with Her Daughter [1906], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

In keeping with his interest in Queen Juana, Pradilla painted this painting of the queen's confinement in Tordesillas Castle, where she spent the rest of her life alongside the cadaver of her husband. Juana sits besides a window in a palace room with a Gothic fireplace. Lost in thought, she gazes at the viewer without noticing her daughter's play. A lady in waiting and a servant on the right contemplate the scene with some sadness. An open door in the background offers a view of the coffin with the body of Felipe “el Hermoso.”

Pradilla abandoned the grandiloquence of enormous history paintings from earlier decades in order to make a small cabinet painting. The studied setting, archeological and historical knowledge used here with a certain eclecticism of clothing and furnishings, are combined with a finished and very polished technique. Those aspects prevent this work from being considered a sketch for a larger painting on the same subject, making this a magnificent example of Pradilla's new pictorial tendencies with regard to history paintings: small format works.

[Museo Nacional del Prado - Oil on canvas, 85 x 146 cm]