Naked woman asleep

Painted in 1867 and in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, this canvas of a sleeping nude woman places Rosales within the long tradition of the reclining female nude while engaging more specifically with the Spanish tradition running from Velázquez's Rokeby Venus through Goya's Maja desnuda. The sleeping nude — a woman unaware of being observed — resolves the tension between viewer and subject in the most convention-friendly direction available to the nineteenth-century male artist, but it also raises the question of surveillance and objectification that later critical reading would explore. Rosales's treatment is characterised by the same direct observation and absence of mythological alibi that marks his secular works: this is a woman sleeping, rendered with the same commitment to observed reality that he brought to his history paintings and portraits. The Buenos Aires acquisition reflects the enthusiasm of Argentine cultural institutions for European academic painting.

The nude requires Rosales to deploy his most sustained academic figure modelling across an extended horizontal composition. His flesh-tone system — warm ochres and pinks with cool blue-grey shadows — provides tonal depth without the warm-throughout approach of Ingres or the cool-throughout approach of Courbet. The drapery surrounding and supporting the figure is handled with the confident broad strokes of his mature manner, providing textural contrast to the polished skin passages.