Juan de Austria's Presentation to Emperor Charles V in Yuste

Rosales painted this in 1869, a year when Spain had no monarch. Isabel II had been driven out in 1868, and through 1869 the Cortes wrote a constitution that kept the monarchy and then went looking around Europe for someone to fill it.

The scene he chose comes from the other end of that royal story. The boy in blue is Jerónimo, the son Charles V had by Barbara Blomberg and never publicly acknowledged. The emperor had resigned his crowns and withdrawn to the monastery of Yuste in Extremadura, and he sits here wrapped against the cold with his greyhounds at his feet while the child is led forward. Charles did see the boy, left instructions about him in a codicil to his will, and it was Philip II who afterwards recognised him as a brother and gave him the name Juan de Austria.

For a history subject the canvas is small, 76 by 123 centimetres, at a time when the medals at the national exhibitions in Madrid were going to pictures the size of a wall.