The Painter's Children in the Japanese Room

On 21 August 1874 Fortuny began this canvas at Portici, on the bay of Naples, in the villa he had taken for the summer. The long room with the pale wall was in that house, and the two children on the divan are his own, María Luisa and little Mariano. He was painting outdoors in the heat all that season, caught malaria, and died in Rome in November, aged 36.

So the canvas stops halfway. Across the lower third it is bare grey priming, and the chalk grid he ruled for the tiled floor is still lying on it. Everything above that line is carried to the last touch. The orange-red satin the girl is wrapped in, the blue Chinese silk over the boy's legs, the gold butterflies and the flowering branch on the wall behind them, and a doll dropped on the floor.