Eugenia Martínez Vallejo, Clothed

In 1680 a six-year-old girl from a village in the archbishopric of Burgos was brought to Madrid to be looked at. Her name was Eugenia Martínez Vallejo. A pamphlet printed in the city that year described her body with open cruelty, and the court had her painted twice. This is the canvas in which she is dressed.

Carreño gave her what a royal sitter would get, the full-length format, the plain dark ground, and adult court clothes, a red and silver brocade gown with slashed sleeves and red ribbons in her hair. She holds a small apple in each hand. The red inventory number of the old royal collection is still painted in the lower corner.

The museum dates the picture to about 1680. No payment record for her has ever been found, so whatever she was at that court, she does not appear to have been on its payroll. What her condition was is unsettled too, read in 1945 as a hormonal disorder and more recently as Prader-Willi syndrome.