Several aspects of the life and artistic career of Rosario Weiss (1814‒1843) set her apart from other Spanish artists of her day. During her childhood and adolescence, she lived with Francisco de Goya, her first tutor, in Madrid and Bordeaux. In the second city, where she spent from 1824 to 1833, she trained in the wake of French Neoclassicism, a style that she later adapted to Spanish Romanticism on returning to Madrid. She became specialised in drawing, which is overwhelmingly predominant in her corpus, and was fortunate enough to be raised in a tolerant and cultivated environment where being a woman did not prevent her from exercising a profession. A draughtswoman, painter and lithographer with a grounding in music, Weiss managed to earn a living from her talent and gained recognition as a professional artist, something that few women of her time achieved: she became an academician of merit of San Fernando and drawing instructor to Isabella II and her sister the Infanta Luisa Fernanda.

The catalogue raisonné of Rosario Weiss’s drawings includes a biographical and artistic study that highlights and contextualises her output. The study also features an important documentary section with appendices listing unlocated works, former attributions and a catalogue of her prints. The aim is to underline the remarkable production of an artist who, despite her youth (she died at the age of twenty-eight), found and developed a style of her own that earned her considerable recognition. This book is also the catalogue of the exhibition with the same title on view at the Biblioteca Nacional de España.

Carlos Sánchez Díez has been a curator at the Museo Lázaro Galdiano since 2002. Prominent among his publications are those on nineteenth-century Spanish drawing, including studies on Valentín Carderera (2004), Jenaro Pérez Villaamil (2006), Eugenio Lucas Velázquez (2012) and Rosario Weiss (2015, 2018); he has also devoted exhibitions to the last three. He is the author of several themed itineraries of the Museo Lázaro Galdiano (Arte y gastronomía, 2012; Encuentro de culturas, 2013) and co-author of Caricaturas. Ilustradores de los siglos XIX y XX en la Colección Lázaro (2013). He has also published Dibujos de Rosario Weiss (1814−1843). Catálogo razonado (2018).