Francisco Pradilla y Ortiz

In 1877 a 29-year-old Spanish painter finishing his training in Rome sent home a single large canvas, and it made him famous across Europe almost overnight. Francisco Pradilla had painted Queen Joanna of Castile, the one history remembers as Juana la Loca, Joanna the Mad, standing in a cold windswept landscape beside the coffin of her husband, Philip the Handsome, whose body she would not let be buried.

Pradilla, born near Zaragoza in 1848, had won one of the first places at the new Spanish Academy in Rome, and it was from there that the picture travelled to the National Exhibition in Madrid, where it took the Medal of Honour in 1878. History painting, grand scenes drawn from the national past, was the prestige genre of the century, and this canvas became one of its most admired Spanish examples.

The success set the course of his life. The Senate commissioned a companion piece, The Surrender of Granada, which took him three years. He worked in Rome, Venice and Paris, studying the old masters, and in 1897 he came back to Madrid to run the Prado, the museum that holds Juana la Loca to this day.