Displaying items by tag: court painter

Cervantes’s "Don Quixote" is considered by many to be among the greatest works of fiction ever written. From the publication in 1605 of the first of two volumes (the second followed ten years later, exactly 400 years ago), the novel enjoyed immense popularity. Reprints and translations spread across Europe, with the adventures of the knight Don Quixote and his companion, Sancho Panza, captivating the continental imagination and influencing both the performing and visual arts.

"Coypel’s Don Quixote Tapestries: Illustrating a Spanish Novel in Eighteenth-Century France" is devoted to a series of tapestries by Charles Coypel (1694−1752), painter to Louis XV, which illustrates twenty-eight of the novel’s most celebrated episodes and woven at the Gobelins Manufactory in Paris. The exhibition includes three Gobelins tapestry panels from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and two Flemish tapestries inspired by Coypel from The Frick Collection, which have not been on view in more than ten years.

Although Peter Paul Rubens is recognized as one of the baroque period’s greatest artists, no woman wants to be called Rubenesque, a term describing the overly healthy figures that populate his work, like the meaty angel of truth in "The Triumph of Truth Over Heresy," or the round-shouldered women in "The Israelites Gathering Manna in the Desert." Both are in the Getty’s unique new exhibit, "Spectacular Rubens: The Triumph of the Eucharist," through Jan. 11.

Rubens and Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia go all the way back to 1609 when he was appointed court painter for her husband, Albert VII of Austria. Widowed in 1621, Isabel, a devout Catholic, turned to her faith and to Rubens as a confidant, even sending him on diplomatic missions, including spying on the French.

This fall, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, presents "Goya: Order and Disorder," a landmark exhibition dedicated to Spanish master Francisco Goya (1746–1828). The largest retrospective of the artist to take place in America in 25 years features 170 paintings, prints and drawings—offering the rare opportunity to examine Goya’s powers of observation and invention across the full range of his work. The MFA welcomes many loans from Europe and the US, including 21 works from the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, along with loans from the Musée du Louvre, the Galleria degli Uffizi, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art (Washington) and private collections. "Goya: Order and Disorder" includes some 60 works from the MFA’s collection of Goya’s works on paper, one of the most important in the world. Many of these prints and drawings have not been on view in Boston in 25 years. Employed as a court painter by four successive rulers of Spain, Goya managed to explore an extraordinarily wide range of subjects, genres and formats. From the striking portrait "Duchess of Alba" (1797) from the Hispanic Society of America, to the tour de force of Goya’s "Seated Giant" (by 1818) in the MFA’s collection, to his drawings of lunacy, the works on view demonstrate the artist’s fluency across media.

Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado is hosting the exhibition Velázquez and the Family of Philip IV, a survey of the artist’s time as a portraitist in the royal Spanish court of King Philip IV. Sponsored by the organization Fundacion AXA, the exhibition will feature 29 works from the last years of Diego Velázquez’s career.

Velázquez and the Family of Philip IV will be presented in chronological order, beginning in 1650 when the artist was working in Rome and executed about a dozen portraits of individuals associated with the papal court. The show then moves on to Velázquez’s return to Spain in 1651 after much insisting from King Philip IV, and continues until the artist’s death in 1660. The show includes a number of works by Velázquez’s successors, his son-in-law Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo and Juan Carreño.

Velázquez and the Family of Philip IV will be on view at the Prado through February 9, 2014.