Eduardo Rosales

Rosales went to Rome in 1857 with friends and no money behind him, no fellowship and no state grant, and he stayed in Italy on and off for 12 years. The government finally gave him a stipend in 1861. He fell in with the Spanish painters who met at the Caffè Greco, and he had tuberculosis.

In 1864 he sent to the national exhibition in Madrid a picture of Queen Isabella the Catholic dictating her will in 1504, in the dim bedchamber of the castle of La Mota, the dying queen propped on high cushions, the secretary Gaspar de Gricio writing at a desk beside the bed. It took the first medal and made his name. Three years later it won a gold medal at the Paris international exposition and he was given the Legion of Honour.

The illness took the rest. He left Rome in 1869, opened a studio in Madrid, tried the milder climate of Murcia, and was stung by the reviews of his Death of Lucretia in 1871. In 1873 the government offered him the directorship of the Spanish Academy in Rome. He accepted it and died in Madrid on 13 September, aged 36, without taking up the post.