Queen María Isabel of Braganza as Founder of the Museo del Prado

By 1829, when this full-length portrait was finished, the woman in it had been dead for 11 years. María Isabel of Braganza, the Portuguese-born second wife of Ferdinand VII, died in childbirth at Aranjuez in 1818, aged 21. She never saw the royal picture museum on the Paseo del Prado open its doors, which it did the following year. Yet here she sits in command of it, holding the plans and approving how the galleries should be hung. Ferdinand ordered the picture to fix the museum's founding to his late queen. Bernardo López Piquer had no living sitter, so he took her face from a small portrait his father, the court painter Vicente López, had made around 1816.