Eugenia Martínez Vallejo, Naked

Painting a child naked was permissible in 1680 if the child was a god. Carreño crowned Eugenia Martínez Vallejo with vine leaves and dark grapes, put a cut vine in her hand and fruit on the stone block she leans against, and the six-year-old brought to the court of Charles II that year stands as a small Bacchus. The museum dates the canvas to about 1680.

For a long time the picture was known as la monstrua desnuda. That is no longer its title at the Prado, where it now carries the sitter's name, and the old one survives in the literature and nowhere on the wall.

It was made as the companion to the portrait of her clothed, and the two stayed together in the royal palaces until 1827, when Ferdinand VII gave this canvas away to the painter Juan Gálvez. It passed through several private hands and returned in 1939 as the gift of José González de la Peña, barón de Forna, which put the pair back in one room.