King Alfonso XII of Spain died at an early age on 25 November 1885. His only son, Alfonso XIII, was born several months later but would not take up the throne until 1902.At the same time, the Banco de España completed work on its headquarters, which had begun in 1884.

The portrait by Manuel Yus is signed shortly after Maria Christina became regent and was commissioned as part of the institution’s established aim to have portraits of the successive heads of State, to play an important representative role in the décor of its most important premises. The execution of this work is very proper and uses formulas that were fashionable in courtly portraits from other countries. Its content is interesting: the queen regent is in the foreground, dressed in black for mourning, and holding the child king, dressed in white and with an olive branch in his right hand.  The olive has been traditionally used to allude to peace and prosperity, and it is a timely reference given that the bloody Carlist Wars had only ended eleven years earlier.

The child is standing on a hard stone table on which there is a russet cushion bearing the sceptre and crown as a mark of his royal status. The base of the table comprises the famous lions obtained through the efforts of Velázquez, which also have a symbolism related to the Spanish monarchy. The floor is covered by a richly woven rug and there is a large mirror over the fireplace in the background. 

To anybody interested in the history of Spanish painting, the work brings to mind portraits from two centuries earlier, also linked to a regent queen and her underage son: the portraits of Mariana of Austria and Charles II painted by Carreño, of which several copies still survive. In contrast to this one, the mother and child do not appear together in them, but are depicted individually. Yet they share so many things in common that it is unlikely that Yus did not take them into account when planning his composition. Apart from the sitters being regent queens and underage kings, the similarities include the mirror. Carreño placed his sitters in the Mirror Room of the Alcazar fortress in Madrid. He used the large mirrors after which the room was named to reflect space and create a sense of depth. Yus does the same with the mirror in the background, where we can glimpse the structure of the room’s ceiling and the shape of the chandelier that lights it. Another even more significant coincidence is the hard stone table with the lion, which is very similar to the one with the console table in Carreño’s painting. Yus thus created a formula that provided a direct link to the tradition of the Spanish courtly portrait.

Javier Portús