Angel with a Crown of Lilies

This is a piece cut out of a larger painting. The rest of it, a Saint Joseph with the Christ Child, is in Detroit, and what stayed behind in Madrid is the angel who carried a crown of Madonna lilies in the upper part of the canvas. It belonged to the set Tiepolo made between 1767 and 1769 for the church of the San Pascual convent at Aranjuez, which hung there from 1770 to 1775. Those pictures were a large job for a man in his seventies, and he leaned on his son Domenico to get through them. The Prado's own note on this fragment says the quality here suggests the father painted the angel himself, though it stops short of insisting on it. The museum bought the piece in 1933, out of the funds the count of Cartagena had left it, from a dealer in Paris. It is 53 centimetres across.