Works in Passing: Cerralbo and the Women Who Protected Cultural Heritage

Pardo Bazán didn't rate this painting. "My portraits have had little luck," she wrote, naming Wertheimer's among those that pleased nobody, and she hung the lot together in a downstairs library at Meirás. He had signed this one in Paris in 1887, bottom right, in French: a souvenir for his "good friend Emilia".

It's a single loan from her house-museum in A Coruña, the fourth round of a series that brings other institutions' works into the Cerralbo. You meet her in the summer entrance hall, in a house where Madrid papers reported her at the marquis's balls, in the library with the scholars. The room sheet explains the link: she defended the Altamira cave paintings as genuine and wrote a 1912 novel set in prehistory. It's the rare loan the sitter herself would have voted against.

Come for one portrait and a long room sheet, then do the rest of the palace. It's included in general admission (€3, €1.50 reduced, free on Sundays).