Maria Christina of Naples and Sicily

This is a small thing, oil on a wooden panel 37 centimetres high, and for most of its history it has hung under the name of Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun, who was working for the Neapolitan court around 1790. In 2021 the Prado cleaned both of the panels it holds under that name and published a study by Javier Baron, its head of 19th-century painting. The varnish came off two good pictures, in his account, neither of them by her. Joseph Baillio, the scholar who has spent a career on Vigee Le Brun, reached the same view and called them anonymous copies of the period, reduced from life-size canvases onto wood. The full-size version of this one is in Naples, at the Museo di Capodimonte. The museum's catalogue line still prints her name. The girl is Maria Cristina, a daughter of Ferdinand IV of Naples, who was himself a son of Charles III of Spain, and the panel stayed in the Spanish royal collection until 1896, then in a Madrid museum of modern art that no longer exists, reaching the Prado in 1971.