María de Figueroa, dressed as a menina

María de Figueroa was eight years old when she stood for this in 1901, dressed as a menina, one of the young attendants who served the infantas at the court of Philip IV two and a half centuries earlier. The costume was play, though the world behind it was not far away. Her father, Rodrigo de Figueroa, later Duke of Tovar, was a friend of the painter, and her mother would in a few years be made a lady-in-waiting to the queen of Alfonso XIII. Sorolla gave the girl a canvas over a metre and a half tall and left a good deal of it thinly covered, with the bare preparation showing near the edges, while the face is worked much further than anything around it. The portrait was a private commission and stayed with the family for a hundred years, until the State bought it for the Prado in 2001 by right of pre-emption. It is not among the pictures currently on the walls.