Garland of Roses

When Ferdinand the Seventh's clerks worked through the New Palace in Madrid between 1814 and 1818, they found this hanging in the offices of the secretariat of state. They wrote it down as a swag of roses of all kinds, about a Spanish yard long, by "the Jesuit", and left the name at that.

There is no medallion in this one, no saint and no Virgin. It is 70 centimetres of roses and ivy gathered with two blue ribbons, the flowers red, white and yellow. The museum's own botanical index picks out the yellow Austrian briar, a white alba rose, the apothecary's rose and the sweet briar, with a large white butterfly among the leaves.

The panel had come down from La Granja, the summer palace in the mountains above Segovia, where in 1746 the inventory of Isabel Farnese's pictures listed it among six similar pieces. The Prado notes that the composition repeats one now in the royal museums in Brussels.