Florinda

Winterhalter was the portraitist every royal court in Europe wanted in the 1850s, which makes this something of a holiday from the day job. Instead of an empress in state robes, he painted a garden full of young women bathing. The subject is an old Spanish legend: Roderic, the last Visigoth king, secretly watches Florinda and the other palace girls to decide who is the fairest, and the affair that follows ends with her father inviting the Moors to invade Spain in revenge. Winterhalter clearly liked the composition. The first version was a gift that Queen Victoria gave to Prince Albert in 1852, and he later reused the same ring of clustered women for his grand group portrait of the Empress Eugenie and her ladies-in-waiting.