This painting captivated me. It was done sometime around 1869, and Rosales was in Rome at the time. He had been painting realistic historical representations of various salient events, and this is a departure from his established theme of the time. It is almost a sketch, completed in one day. Rosales left much of the canvass showing and used it to great effect for the shadowing and some of the detail. The work is very nice to look at from a distance, as everything melds together and is a graceful representation of the female form; however it is also interesting to look at it up close, exploring the technicalities of the construction of the form, seeing how to get her hair’s texture Rosales put paint on and then smeared it off to leave more of the texture showing, leaving the grey sections on the skin unpainted to create darker regions. The curtain is the most painted part of the work, and one can still see the brush strokes up close.  This beautiful sketch caught my eye as I was walking by, and it’s growing to be one of my favorite paintings at the Prado. It is light, sensual and evocative.