Sunday, October 18, 2015

Spanish Pictures I

Diego Velázquez
Waterseller of Seville
1623
formerly in the Buen Retiro, currently in a London collection

Having described picture-gathering in Italy and picture-gathering in the Flemish territories, Jonathan Brown and J.H. Elliott continue their account of Spanish royal picture-gathering of the 1630s. Quotations below are from A Palace for a King : The Buen Retiro and the Court of Philip IV (New Haven : Yale University Press, 1980) 

"The third and final source of pictures by contemporary artists was of course Madrid. The decoration of the Retiro provided an opportunity for Spanish court painters unequaled in the seventeenth century. To some extent, the opportunity outran the ability of the available talent. There was, however, one painter of genius on hand: Velázquez. ... In addition to commissioned works, there were paintings done by Velázquez earlier in his career. Besides the two important pictures painted in Italy in 1630, the Forge of Vulcan and Joseph's Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob (below), there was also his most famous early work, The Waterseller of Seville (above), which was probably a gift of the Cardinal-Infante, its third documented owner."

Diego Velázquez
Forge of Vulcan
c. 1630
Prado

Diego Velázquez
Joseph's Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob
c. 1630
Monasterio de San Lorenzo, El Escorial

"At the court, Velázquez worked in isolation from his senior colleagues, the now old-fashioned Vicente Carducho and Eugenio Cajés, who were still practicing an Italianate style they had learned forty years earlier. But these artists through their long years of royal service had earned the right to participate in the decoration of the Retiro."

Vicente Carducho
Santa Inés
1637
Prado

Vicente Carducho
Adolphus, Gothic King 
1634-35
Prado

"The presence of the older generation of Spanish painters at the Retiro was even more emphatically asserted by Pedro de Orrente, a painter born in Murcia in 1580, who had probably worked in the Bassano family atelier in Venice. On his return to Spain, Orrente specialized in Bassanesque paintings of rustic Old and New Testament scenes set in extensive landscapes long after the tradition had died out in Italy."

Pedro de Orrente
Laban Overtaking Jacob
c. 1620-25
Prado

Pedro de Orrente
Abraham & Isaac
1630s
Prado

"The younger generation of painters in Madrid included several fine artists, but none of them could approach the originality or modernity of Velázquez. Félix Castelo and Jusepe Leonardo were both content to follow the example of their masters Carducho and Cajés."

Félix Castelo
Theodoric, Gothic King
1635
Prado

Jusepe Leonardo
Alaric, Gothic King
1635
Prado

"A more adventurous painter was Francesco Collantes, one of the rare Spanish landscape specialists of the seventeenth century. Collantes, born in 1599, the same year as Velázquez, is given as the author of twenty-two paintings in the 1701 inventory, almost all of which are landscapes. Working in the vein of late sixteenth-century Flemish landscape specialists, Collantes produced tranquil, limpid scenes of imaginary nature, populated by small foreground figures. All his identifiable works were installed in the private quarters."

Francisco Collantes
Landscape with Crucifixion of Peter
1630s
Prado

Francisco Collantes
Landscape with Adoration of the Shepherds
1630s
Prado


Francisco Collantes
Landscape
1630s
Prado

"The youngest painter to participate in the decoration of the Retiro was Antonio de Pereda, who had been born in Valladolid in 1611. His appearance on the scene was the result of the patronage of Crescenzi. Pereda's moment in the limelight was brief, ending with the death of his patron in 1635. The failure to secure his position was unfortunate, for his considerable talent seldom found a suitable outlet thereafter."   

Antonio de Pereda
Immaculate Conception
1630s
Prado

Antonio de Pereda
Annunciation
1630s
Prado