When Louis-Philippe opened his Galerie Espagnole at the Louvre in 1838, he brought together 438 paintings acquired in Spain, offering French audiences an unprecedented opportunity to encounter artists who had previously been poorly represented in the royal collections. The gallery lasted only a decade, closing after the King’s overthrow in 1848, before the collection was dispersed at auction in London in 1853. Its influence was nevertheless considerable. Delacroix and Courbet, among others, found in Velázquez, Ribera, Zurbarán and Murillo alternatives to the academic tradition, while the gallery contributed to a wider nineteenth-century reassessment of Spanish painting that would profoundly shape Manet’s generation. Manet’s celebrated description of Velázquez as the “painter of painters”, written after his visit to the Prado in 1865, belonged to this broader process, through which the art of seventeenth-century Spain became increasingly central to the development of modern European painting.
Britain participated in the same process through collecting, scholarship and the formation of public museums. Several works from Louis-Philippe’s gallery entered the National Gallery following the 1853 sale, including Zurbarán’s Saint Francis in Meditation, while collectors and travellers brought Spanish paintings into collections across the country. William Stirling Maxwell’s Annals of the Artists of Spain, published in 1848, was the first scholarly history of Spanish art in English. Its extensive use of documentary and biographical material helped establish a more historically grounded understanding of Spanish artists and the institutions and patrons for whom they worked.
The term “Spanish Golden Age” now provides a convenient description for the extraordinary concentration of artistic production associated principally with seventeenth-century Spain, but it can also obscure the differences contained within it. The courtly world of Velázquez in Madrid was distinct from the commercial and devotional culture of Seville in which Zurbarán and Murillo worked, while Ribera spent almost his entire career in Spanish Naples. El Greco, born in Crete and initially trained in the tradition of icon painting, absorbed the art of Venice and Rome before developing his mature practice in Toledo. To study the Spanish school is therefore to examine a network that extended across the Spanish Habsburg territories and the wider Catholic world, rather than a single, uniform national tradition.
These questions form the background to the latest episode of Colnaghi Talks, in which we are joined by Daniel Sobrino Ralston, CEEH Associate Curator of Spanish Paintings at the National Gallery. Reflecting on the development of his career and his work with Spanish paintings, Ralston discusses the experience of studying works across collections and the ways in which curatorial research can reshape the histories attached to familiar artists. The conversation considers the particular demands of the Spanish Golden Age, from questions of attribution and provenance to the relationship between paintings and the architectural or devotional settings from which they have often been removed.
We invite you to watch the latest episode, available here, and to follow the series as it continues on our YouTube channel.
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