Displaying items by tag: prado museum

During the culturally repressive late-16th and 17th centuries, Spanish kings often secreted away their nude paintings in rooms known as “salas reservadas,” where they could enjoy them in private.

Eventually, these works made it out into the open and, in 1830, into a gallery at the Prado Museum in Madrid, where they remain among the finest of that institution’s holdings.

Four iconic paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and other Old Masters will remain at Madrid's Prado Museum after a protracted battle with a new national museum.

The Prado took in Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights (1500–1505) for safekeeping in 1936, at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War at the request of the royal collection, which owns the work.

An exhibition with the formidable title "Spectacular Rubens: The Triumph of the Eucharist" opened this week at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The show comes to us from the Prado Museum in Madrid by way of the Getty in Los Angeles. It consists of four huge 17th-century tapestries along with the small (very small by comparison) paintings by Rubens that served as their designs, plus assorted other things that I'll mention later. Houston is the last stop before everything is shipped back to the owners, mostly in Madrid, perhaps never to travel again, almost certainly not all together.

The tapestries, only four of a full series that numbers 20, are from Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales (Convent of the Barefoot Royals) in Madrid, and they are indeed spectacular, as the title says -- large enough to cover walls many people high, woven by some of the finest tapestry factories of their day and of a quality seldom equaled.

The Prado Museum has devoted an exhibition to showcase the results of the time the painter Francisco de Goya dedicated to working on tapestries.

The Royal Tapestry Factory’s commission to Francisco de Goya to paint tapestry cartoons in 1775 brought the artist to Madrid where he eventually spent two decades of his life. “Goya in Madrid” analyzes the Spaniard’s works and the sources that inspired him.

A total of 142 pieces, which were the models to create the tapestries to decorate El Escorial and El Pardo palaces, were made by the artist during the period he spent at the Spanish royal court. The cartoons have belonged to the Prado Museum since 1870, when they arrived from the Royal Palace.

After a triumphant tour of Japan, then the United States and ending in Italy, the "Girl with a Pearl Earring" has returned home to the Mauritshuis royal picture gallery in The Hague. For ever. The museum, which reopened last month after two years' renovation work, will no longer allow Vermeer's masterpiece out. Officially the Mona Lisa of the North has been gated in order to please visitors to the Mauritshuis who only want to see that painting. Its fame has steadily increased since Tracy Chevalier published her novel in 1999 followed in 2004 by the film by Peter Webber starring Scarlett Johansson. Anyone wanting to see the portrait will have make the trip to the Dutch city.

"Girl with a Pearl Earring" thus joins the select band of art treasures that never see the outside world. Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" never leaves the Uffizi in Florence; "Las Meninas" by Velázquez stays put at the Prado in Madrid; Picasso's "Guernica" remains just down the road at the Reina Sofia museum; and his "Demoiselles d'Avignon" can only be seen at MoMA in New York.

“Diego Velazquez: The Early Court Portraits” opened at Dallas’ Meadows Museum this past Sunday and in preparing for the exhibition, researchers may have uncovered the artist’s first portrait of his life-long subject, King Philip IV of Spain. Named the king’s court painting in 1623 at the age of 24, Velazquez upheld this position until his death in 1660, forming one of the most significant relationships in art history.

In order to make the Velazquez exhibition possible, the Meadows Museum teamed up with Spain’s national art museum, Museo del Prado. The show includes a portrait of the poet Gongora y Argote from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, a portrait of a court jester painted in the early 1630s that is on loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art, and a never-before-seen portrait of Philip IV from a private Spanish collection.

The Meadows Museum is proud to bring together two of Velazquez’s early portraits of the king for the first time in four centuries. One is the Prado’s full-length portrait painted in the 1620s of the king dressed entirely in black and the other is the Meadows’ own bust-length portrait. Before the show opened, both portraits underwent analysis at the Prado and X-rays revealed hesitant brush strokes on the Meadows portrait indicating that this was Velazquez’s first attempt at drawing the king.

“The Early Court Portraits” will be on view through January 13, 2013.