A Restored Velázquez, A Velázquez Restored

I keep Christiansen I'm chairman Department your peon paintings it's my great pleasure but not to welcome you here this afternoon and we'll try and get you out those of you who are just fans to get back to the really important issues of the day but for us this is a very important day the collection of philosophers are met I think some of you may be aware is most extensive in America and we're really fortunate in New York because if you think of the three great features of at the Hispanic society and then the marvelous portrait of Philip support at the Frick only outside Spain only London hat can offer its of a similar outstanding group of works by this most outstanding of painters now by my count there are possibly ten paintings by the lobsters in New York and when I say possibly can it's because a number of issues at the Metropolitan continue to be this is the attribution convenience you didn't and as all of you know this last summer the cleaning of one of those pictures that are long been assigned to the workers out of a lot of tests revealed a totally Shibata graphic work and although I don't expect this experience to be repeated at anytime soon I will refer to another picture this afternoon you're going to hear first from me then from Michael Gallagher who is the our brilliant head of paintings conservation and from Jonathan Brown who is who has spent a lifetime studying Spanish painting he is the outstanding scholar of Spanish painting and who's written the most authoritative book on Velazquez and I think I want to take this opportunity right now to thank Jonathan for his kind collaboration with us as we have proceeded in the in the study of our works by Velasquez it's been an absolute pleasure to work with Jonathan and really the lecture series today is his lecture that we are that we're building up to what I want to do very quickly is to trace the formation of the collection at the Metropolitan because in an encapsulated way it tells the story of the rising esteem for Velazquez in the 19th and 20th centuries and the efforts that were made at the Metropolitan to make sure that this great artist was represented in the in the museum it may come as something of a surprise to many of you but Velazquez was not well known in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries having worked so closely with the court of Philip the force his reputation was largely confined to Spain Maria was far more famous in Europe in the 18th century and it was Maria who was considered the greatest of Spain's Golden Age it was with the triumph of realism and Impressionism in the 19th century that Velazquez came to displace murió in the pantheon of artists by the 20th century Velazquez of course has become viewed not simply as the greatest Spanish painter before Goya but one of the greatest painters who ever lived I think there are those who would say quite simply that he was the greatest magician of paint in the history of Western art when in 1970 the Metropolitan Museum purchased the portrait of Velasquez's mulatto slave Juan de pareja for a record-setting price it was felt that it had secured a unique masterpiece the crown of the collection I don't know how many of you remember the subway advertisements encouraging people to come and see the most expensive painting in the world a place that had previously been held by Rembrandt's Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer but it was I thought then a very audacious move and it's a long time since this museum has demonstrated that sort of braggadocio and yet today 5.5 million dollars sounds like nothing when compared to what is spent by private collectors at any sale of 19th and 20th century and of course one of the real outcomes of the what we call the the demographics of the economy following deregulation how been that that museums are no longer the principle buyers of great works of art private collectors are and were increasingly dependent on films of the falafels anthropic interests of collectors to to augment our collection which is why I suppose that this is the time for me to say that we are very happy to solicit cheques from any of you in the audience you just send them to the European paintings department and the little notation part of the bottom you say for acquisitions that I guarantee they will be well spent as I think all of you know this picture of Wanda Correa was painted in Rome in 1650 where it was exhibited to great acclaim Velasquez manages to convey not only the physical presence of the sitter by his proud character wanda Perret of course became a painter in his own right he was freed by Velasquez in 1650 for the act of liberation was actually signed in Rome in November of 1650 nine months after the picture was displayed but Wanda parea was required to remain another four years with his master the picture stayed in Italy until 1776 when it was acquired by Sir William Hamilton and between 1814 and 1970 it belonged to the Earl's of Radner I don't think that there's any doubt that this is one of the icons of the museum and I don't think anybody begrudges the amount of money that was spent on it at the time it quickly displaced the previously purchased philosophers an equestrian portrait of Count Duke Oh Lavar s Philip the fourth powerful minister that was bought from the Earl of Elgin the first notice of this impressive picture is 1806 I hope you're getting the parameters is early 19th century is usually about the earliest we can trace these pictures - it's a reduced variant of a large painting in the Prado and when it was acquired the museum was convinced it was purchasing a major work by the artists however the other day and looking through the files I noted with increased interest that some of our more critically minded visitors did not share the opinion of the curators and of course one of the objects of the exhibition upstairs is to encourage critical viewing so I just want to mention that shortly after it was purchased that it was purchased and put on view one visitor wrote a letter that is in our files in which I quote he expressed my amazement and indignation at the remarkable attribution of a fourth-rate copy to the hand of Velazquez there was a discussion whether the letter should be whether a reply should be made to this letter it was finally decided was safer just to let the matter die I think that the letter is an exaggeration but the matter of Velasquez's personal involvement in this picture remains unresolved by which I mean there's no real consensus among scholars and this is due to the fact that we still know too little about the workshop of Velazquez and the capabilities of those in it and what sort of function a reduced replica like this it's actually not a replica there are variants the landscape is completely original the horses white not brown etc what sorts what what what kind of prestige would have attached to it Velazquez his son-in-law Juan Bautista Tommaso became a gifted painter in his own right and he must have been a principal assistant the workshop but can he have a can he be credited with having painted this picture which as I say is not a reduced replica reduced copy but a variant at this stage one can only advance an opinion but one deprived of the kinds of evidence one would like to have interestingly matzoh has also been proposed as the author of this picture and this is the first painting associated with Velazquez to enter this museum it formed part of the of the gift made in 1889 by Henry Markland railroad magnate philanthropist and a president of the Metropolitan you might also remember that he gave us our first Vermeer the picture can be traced back to 1813 when it was acquired in Spain and it was considered a self-portrait by Velazquez when it entered the museum but already nearly twentieth century this attribution and identification were dropped the recent suggestion that it could be a self-portrait of so seems to me really highly speculative it's par to early to be a to to move in this direction a quarter of a century later the museum was bequeathed two very important paintings by Benjamin Altman whose gift of works of art transformed the museum's collection overnight to one of international status the greatest of these two is the sup word Emmaus on the left a work painted in Seville prior to Velasquez's moved to Madrid in 1623 but the second one is scarcely less interesting it's a portrait of Philip the fourth painted in 1624 the year after Velazquez arrived in Madrid and was a paint and was appointed official painter to the king both of these pictures have a checkered attributional history and both are in less than optimal condition but the suffered Emmaus is now pretty universally accepted well the final verdict has yet to be delivered on the portrait in fact the picture is currently the subject of study it is not on view in the galleries upstairs because it is undergoing a thorough restoration under the hands of Michael Gallagher last week Michael Gallagher Walter lidtke who's writing a catalogue on the Spanish paintings and myself made a trip to Madrid to study comparative material when the picture was sold to Benjamin Altman by descendants of the family for whom it was painted it was accompanied by a receipt signed by Velasquez himself and this is in the museum's collection the the the papers run through the Mecca the mechanism of payment to Velazquez and I've transcribed over here the this line here you'll see diego velázquez cut to the pagoda of auto joseon tory alice the diego velázquez and there's his signature at the end he received 800 Velazquez i eight hundred realities for three pictures Philip this Philip the fourth the minister olive Aras and one of himself the man who commissioned the picture Don Garcia Perez the RCL was closely associated with the Court and accompanied the king to Seville in February of 1624 he must have commissioned the picture immediately after the trip however he died that September and the portrait together with the with the one of olive Aras and the portrait of Don Garcia was paid by his wife his wife incidentally when she remarried was depicted again by Velazquez the museum's picture is based on an official portrait done for the King but that work no longer survives and ours is the earliest portrait of Philip the fourth for which documents exist for years Velasquez scholars have remarked to me that the status of the picture can only be properly determined after it's properly cleaned but we knew it was badly compromised and the cleaning of it posed real problems however following the very happy result of the port we're discussing today we decided to take the radical step of cleaning the work the results have been illuminating they bear on a whole series of issues relating to the lost kiss and our understanding of his workshop practice and I hope that at another post point we will have a be able to have a discussion similar to this one about that picture this brings a brings us to the two remaining pictures that we now ascribe without hesitation to Velazquez the recently cleaned portrait of a man and the bus length portrait of Maria Teresa the daughter of the king both of these were bequeathed to the museum by jewels beige in a sense beige is the history is that is the hero of the story we have to tell today and I'd just like to to look over a do a short review of his life born in Germany he came to the US as a young boy in 1881 he began work as a cashier at a Stoke bra crostata stock brokerage firm owned by his uncle within five years he was a minority partner and in 1892 he took control of the business he renamed it J the J s Bateson company and it became one of the top firms in the u.s. outranked only by Merrill Lynch he obviously had a feeling for painting and he selected old masters with an admirably Catholic taste not for him the preserve of a single school or type of painting here's his house at 8:00 at 814 Fifth Avenue the interior of which was filled with works of art so important is beige to the collection of the Metropolitan Museum they want to pause for a minute to consider some of its highlights since among them are some that I'm sure you would count among your favorites in the museum here's a selection of some of his Italian paintings I think many of you will recognize Philippa lippies Madonna and Child Filipino lippies Madonna and Child painted for the stratsi family in Florence cinderelly's Madonna and Child retained by cinderelly and given to his nephew on the occasion of a marriage curve Ellie's divine little Madonna in child Cosmo Torres flight into Egypt and what is possibly the museum's finest Titian the Venus and Adonis it was scarcely less fine when it came to early Netherlandish and included patrons Chris to pay trees Chris deuces marvelous Carthusian monks a Garrard Ovid triptych of the Nativity a whole Bynes portrait of their of Derek Burke - wonderful portraits by France halls and Rembrandt's standard-bearer two of the most glorious of the museum's Van Dyke's his self-portrait and his portrait of Robert rich the second Earl of Warwick and the two Velasquez's and Goya's Don Manuel soryo when I say that this museum is deeply indebted to the philanthropic to the philanthropy of collectors private collectors in this city it is no exaggeration in jewels beige is one of our greatest donors I thought some of you would be interested to see the interior of the house as published in The Herald Tribune in 1937 here was the entrance hall so we run round there was the filippino lippi the senior rally and and I think that there that they're all registered in the caption below another view of the of the inti of the interior of the hallway with additionally Gilliland IOT's portrait of Francesco sassette II and his son the Goya the Giacometti oven HT on a portrait on the other side here's the sitting room with the Garrett David triptych hanging above a couch next what beige called his Dutch room and well he might the Rembrandt has now is now considered a workshop piece but there's the France halls there's the second Earl of Warrick by Van Dyck and here's the little Velazquez Maria Teresa another view of the same room with the Rembrandt standard-bearer the Van Dyck self-portrait and the other France halls and then here's the French room with fraggin our fraggin our fraggin our Votto the French comedians at one point beige thought of establishing his house as a museum on the model of the Frick he opened the lower floor to visitors on application several days a week but by the time he died in 1944 he had scuttled this idea instead he left his collection of paintings to a foundation with the understanding that the whole collection would go to the Metropolitan Museum it was reported in The Herald Tribune that Bates had reasoned as follows and I quote after mature consideration of the future I felt I'd like to know where the collection would be 100 years from now after keeping a private Museum for several years I realized there's no great future for a small private museum I felt that the collection should be made more convenient to a growing public all I can say is I wish there were more collectors like this of course beige took care of his daughters financially but he obviously felt that the collection was an aspect of his life he wanted to memorialize and perpetuate and we've all been the beneficiaries we can get an additional sense a real insight into his very strong self-image in his wonderful but hardly modest mausoleum which he built in Riverdale as an Egyptian temple in 1949 the Bates Collection officially entered the Metropolitan Museum so what about the portrait of the man that is today's subject here's what we know about it sometime before circa 1800 it was acquired as the work of Anthony Van Dyck by Johann Ludwig Craig scarf on bald mulden gimboid he was the illegitimate son of george ii of Great Britain and of his mistress Amal a faun Vivaldi who was created for the occasion Countess of Yarmouth raised at the court of st. James Johann Ludwig made the Grand Tour in 1765 and then settled in Hanover where he built a castle to house the collection of antiquities he had amassed was it during this time possibly that he had found the velázquez and purchased it without understanding who it was by in 1818 his son Ludwig gorg tiddle a distinguished general in the Austrian Calvary sold a picture to David Bernhardt Houseman and it was in that collection that in 1854 a British collector connoisseur Sir Hugh Oh Sir Hugh Hume Campbell saw the work and first identified it as a painting by Velazquez in 1857 it was sword sold to george v king of hanover duke of brunswick-lüneburg duke of cumberland he was the last king of hanover and a member of the german branch of the house of hanover and not surprising first cousin to Queen Victoria he inherited the Hanoverian realm and put the music put his collection on view in the Hanover Museum it was there that a leading velocity of scholar Auguste mayor came upon the picture in the early 20th century it hung among the paintings ascribed to the circle of Rembrandt but in 1917 Mayer published it as a self portrait by Velazquez here's a photo showing the way it looked at the time not long after Mayer revised his first opinion suggesting instead the name of Velasquez's pupil and future son-in-law Juan Bautista del mafioso you can see already that one is juggling with uncertainty uncertainties and the parameters that can be drawn around Velasquez himself it was however an unfortunate change of mine and it had been prompted we later discover by a discussion with a Spanish colleague whose ideas Mayor had not fully understood in 1925 the picture was sold to a German art dealer Leo bloomin right and it is at this stage that Joseph Devine one of the legendary figures of the art market enters the story he wanted to purchase the picture from bloomin right and to sell it to one of his clients but he realized that his plans would be spoiled unless mayor could be convinced to abandon the attribution to matzah but he also knew that if bloomin reich knew that mayor had changed his mind and ascribed the picture to Velazquez then he would not be able to purchase the picture for next to nothing and sell it for a huge profit you can see the bind he's in mayor proved a tough customer he wanted to be fair to bloomin right and he didn't like the idea of changing his mind yet again most of all of being forced to change his mind through the lure of money he thought it would ruin his reputation Duveen used every inducement imaginable and in November of 1925 he finally wore mayor down mayor caved in came to Paris to view the painting which Duveen very cleverly had according to a cable that we have in our files had the picture cleaned up a little as I think it would give a much clearer effect for a discussion with mayor he was right and now November 20th the cable was sent to New York triumphantly announcing to Devine mayor passes Velazquez I think it'd be naive not to be somewhat cynical about mayor's change of mind given the financial stakes involved he of course was paid for his trouble and pressed to write an article but the recently cleaning of the painting suggests the degree to which the picture mayor studied that November really did look utterly different from what he had previously known justifying his exclamation that seeing the clean picture was one of them most delightful surprises which I have ever had in my life now I do want to mention that in these comparative photographs the the photo of the image of it before cleaning actually makes the picture look better than it did in the galleries and those of you who remember the picture in the galleries will recognize us immediately because having been taken with powerful photographic lamps they are actually penetrating the varnish in the way that your own eyes did not Mayor went on to say oh wow how did we end up with this that's the view of Delft through Vermeer that's very interesting sorry there there we are whoa let me see if I can get rid of this this must be Walter's lecture here we are how about that that's for tomorrow night there we are the modeling is simply marvelous wrote Mayer the painting is like a flowing watercolor the tints of the face look like mother-of-pearl it has come out most splendidly the picture lost all the dimness and shows now the characteristic silver gray tone of the works of these years Mayer wrote these lines to the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts who was also the editor of the of the Journal of art in America in which Mayer would publish his views in 1926 what a shame then that instead of leaving the picture in this state it was through extensive retouching transformed into a more formal finished portrait such as might appeal to davines stable of clients among whom was of course jules beige who purchased it shortly thereafter for two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars off who skated behind repaints and a thick much yellowed varnish by 1955 the picture little resembled the work that Mayor had admired in the restored studio the attribution of the patriot of Velazquez was questioned by a major spanish scholar who found the picture lacking the artists rich subtlety and frankness of execution in 1963 jose lopez ray the great Velasquez scholar cataloged the picture as a peace rather close to Velasquez's banner which was not that far off considering the altered appearance of the picture and after this the work gradually dropped out of consideration in 1979 the museum decided the time had come to downgrade the attribution of the to the workshop of the lost qez well I've always been intrigued by this picture which which whenever possible I hung in the gallery so when last spring Michael Gallagher was working on the great portrait of Philip the fourth at the Frick I asked that the patriotic and it's at this point that I'd like to turn the story over to Michael Gallagher this right here we go good afternoon um when I first came to the museum in October 2005 not long thereafter Keith and myself walked through the galleries and we discussed paintings and in particular paintings that might benefit eventually from being examined or looked at more closely in conservation and along the way we looked at this portrait and Keith said at the time it's a picture that it was intrigued him he talks about its connection or possible connection with the surrender of Breda and we agreed that it was interesting and a lot of people since the exhibition have said to me you know sort of what took you so long and when we did a press view together a few months ago now I said at the time if I have known that the transformation would be so great I would have known in the first week great paintings make you look better as a conservator and but it isn't always clear that a picture will benefit from conservation this is the image of the painting before treatment I think once your eye has been primed by seeing it in the galleries you see many of the qualities but believe me when it was on the wall that was not clear I would often go through the galleries and I would over the course of the villa's intervening years and look at it just in passing for a minute or so and you know the fortunes of the picture in my mind went up and down and the whole concept of whether it would be a wise thing to do also changed this is a detail before treatment of the costume and I think it really gives some idea of how dead the whole thing looked I think you can see their art with some drip marks in varnish there is a sort of a dullness all across here that wasn't it wasn't so evident whether that was just a product of the varnish and people sometimes think that any picture when it's cleaned will be better will look better fresher and that isn't always the case a bad picture can sometimes have a sort of mystique under a discoloured varnish that once you remove that you just simply end up with a bad picture and nobody particularly wants to be the means of apparatus for unveiling a bad picture similarly a painting that it was once a good picture that but has been severely damaged perhaps by harsh cleaning in the past abrasion and other problems ethically if we uncover something like that there is only so much we can do in terms of restoration so again you know what would be the benefit the picture told the story as it was in in the galleries and perhaps all that would happen was it would be immediately relegated to the store never to be looked at again however sorry there was something very compelling about the portrait and again this is before treatment enormous ly magnified and as he said before with strong photography lights but the work quality is evident and that was what always kept me curious about the picture and so as Jesus said this blush spring and summer when the Frick picture was here it seemed a very good idea to bring the picture up for examination interestingly we had a couple of the other paintings up that are in the little display upstairs and for example the portrait of the man the keys showed earlier I'm sorry I don't have a slide of it evidently that wasn't didn't need cleaning it was a very handsome pleasing portrait or but there was no question in our mind that this was a work by Velasquez another portrait that we have that doesn't we haven't even put on display is so possibly over-painted but again no no a burning desire to sort of go into any sort of treatment however this picture was something quite different when it came up I opted to do after careful examination in in the the great light we have in the studio I opted a cleaning test along this part here and the change was very radical I I knew from we had fairly scant documentation but I knew it had been treated a number of times whilst it had been here in the Mets collection each time it hadn't actually been cleaned the varnish layers hadn't been removed simply more varnish had been put on top and when Devine had this restored as Keith said when Maya saw it he describes something that that is very much like the clean state photo what what happened subsequently was that the picture was tidied up to turn into a sort of more finished portrait and all master so in this before treatment which is if you imagine this is the 1920s restoration that has become darker over the years the varnishes have got darker the toning used to quiet and the slightly lively brushwork in the background has darkened and one of the key areas you'll see in a moment in the after cleaning where there are problems are is in the hair whether the artist made quite dramatic changes that subsequently were worn in a previous cleaning and so on and a very artificial and rather rigid contour had been applied to the head and the toning again of this of the freely painted areas in the in the drapery had sort of really become so foggy that you didn't see any any modeling at all the radical change Keith and I discussed we suddenly saw these sort of deep rich blacks this sort of more silvery sense of the Grays but there was still a question whether that will how abraded the picture was and if you imagine when you're looking in a small area you can't always assume that that is how the whole picture is going to be you can't always read into the tube to that small test sufficient information to get a different reading of the picture as a whole but it was it was significantly intriguing that in the end I decided to proceed with the cleaning clean state paintings are always a little disconcerting I think if you're not used to seeing them for one thing we take the photography at a midway stage when varnish and over paints have been removed but before the painting is properly saturated with the varnish so I always describe varnish if you think of a pebble at the beach that you wet out and the richness of tone and color that that emerges that is what a varnish does with an all master painting that is why they were varnished and so that the saturation is less in here so you don't get the full range of tones in the doublet you don't get the full depth of tone in the hair but what became immediately clear and I mean about two and a half hours after I'd started the cleaning I called Keith he came over immediately and we were both very very excited by what we were seeing and it very quickly became clear that this was not a highly finished portrait but it was much more of a life study that was never taken to a full level of completion it was it wasn't as if it was unfinished in the sense of the artist was interrupted but it its purpose was not as a sort of fully commissioned portrait the the retouching obviously there was a couple of little holes here that had to be these were filled one down here at the edge and then the retouching pretty much was in this area here and very carefully on the magnification where I could see where I could where the strokes had been interrupted by being rubbed I could put in a few little dots of color but the main change you'll see when I change slide is one of saturation and you get this really extraordinary fresh dynamic portrait really the pitch is constructed on a sort of pinkish gray ground that's the paint layer that was put over the entire canvas surface prior to painting you see it's showing through a little here and here and if when you see the paintings in the gallery's you'll sense the the role that that sort of warm under layer has through the whole picture Velasquez would have laid out the the features and the position of the of the body using a sort of a brush black black a blackish Brown paint with a brush here is a little cancelled line it may be the position of rut raised arm it may be something else but if you imagine that the whole of this picture was probably sketched in all of the features the position with this sort of line and then from there he will have he would have developed the the volumes with us as quite a thin applications veils of other sort of blackish brown paint it's painted with X startling Authority great rapidity in many places the the wonderful collar here which would have been really painted in a matter of seconds you you can sense the movement of the brush when you go upstairs and see it you have these you know dashing little that's for three or four dashing little strokes of the white that immediately orientate the collar give you a sense of its consistency and that the doublet as a whole is it's very summery in its and its treatment you get a sense of the volume of the shoulder you get a sense of of some of the tailoring details but it is not taken to a high level of Finnish the concentration the focus is all on the head and which is really just a I think a miraculous bit of painting and this this thin brown I was to Robert blackish-brown you can sense how the picture might have looked at one point when it was all in a sort of monochrome state being worked up I found from working on the Frick picture working on this picture it is possible to try and break up the painting technique in two steps but it's very artificial we can make generalizations I mean he's using the thinner blackish-brown tones leaving some ground of visible leaving some of this monochrome under layer visible and then building up with more opaque but quite liquid color creating these sort of pearly effects where they put very thinly over the dark under layer and then getting more and more thickly painted to create these this wonderful rosy hue here in the cheek the sort of liquid highlights over the brow over the nose and so forth and then you know obviously the mustache is added a little later this fantastic so of line just shooting up here this race of perky mustache but the reason I say it's it's it's it's a generalization is because what is so extraordinary about him as an artist is he doesn't more eat it it's a it's a sense it's a fool's errand to try and break this down into a ten step painting technique there are periods in art that you can do that the word there were workshop techniques at different periods where literally you you painted that layer you waited it'll dry you'd at that you did this you I think anyone can tell looking at this that there is this extraordinary intuition and intelligence in and sensitivity in recording visual data this hand eye connection that is is simply dazzling so though it's easy to say that you know a stroke like the highlight here or here is put on at the end of the process it really tells you nothing about what an extraordinary picture this is I here is the before and after in the face I think when you look back you can see the qualities but I also think this marvelous sense of almost slightly moist skin that of the way the light glances off off the skin stretched over the bone structure the wonderful texture of hair the softness of the lips the slight move in focus or were really not evident before and have been one of the the great aspects of recovery so we are in the museum extremely excited to have this picture and it's a painting that of course when you go up and look at it in isolation is it really stands on its own merits it's um it says it's a picture that you can very much enjoy without knowledge but the wonderful thing about works of art is that often when they're put into a greater context the context of the artists life and period they resonate all the more and that is why Professor Jonathan Browns collaboration with Keith and I was so important and stimulating and really why we wanted to do this talk today because it's that expertise that really will bring this picture to life thank thank you very much it's always a pleasure to talk about Velasquez and I have been known to go on for hours however given the minutes of time patience of the audience and I guess above all the Jets game I will be as brief as I can possibly be but let me begin you saw briefly from years of you have Delft you may wonder what in God's name it's doing in this context and a former colleague of mine known to many of you Robert rosenbloom was a great specialist in the great friend and he was a specialist in outrageous comparisons and I've only saw he didn't live to see this one in any event why would I think of putting these two together well there is no intrinsic reason but it so happens that some years ago London magazine took a poll of British artists art historians and art critics as to which was the greatest painting in the history of Western Europe and the winner was the painting on the left must be ninis by the Velazquez his masterpiece and in second place was the view of Delft now as a matter of fact you may say well what do they possibly have in common and that I can assure you is the subject for another day's conversation but I think on the one hand it's the kind of almost debt the deadpan and yet very suggestive approach to landscape taken by Vermeer and with Velasquez of course the Enigma of what's going on and that really dynamic tension of and daring of leaving such a leading question entirely open to interpretation now as I say that's not what I'm talking about today and the only reason I brought Vermeer into play is that he is renowned as one of the least productive painters of all time and he lived from 1632 to 1675 a lifespan of 43 years an active career of 22 years and if you do a crude calculation it turns out that he painted about a picture and a half a year during his active career so definitely a withholding genius but Velasquez is a close second he was born in 1599 he died in 1660 a lifespan of 61 years an active career of 43 years an output of roughly 110 to 115 paintings and translated into a crude average that's 2.7 paintings per year now it's clear that this is a kind of if you like a race to the bottom as to who painted less but the mitigating factor is that Vermeer was a private painter so to speak words Velasquez was a court painter he had been brought to the court of Philip the fourth in 1623 and his job really was to make a central job was to make portraits of the King and members of the royal family and if we think of a contemporary of his famous contemporary Anthony Van Dyck who fulfilled a similar role at the court of Charles the first in the early 1630s in there the pictures are counted by the dozens but Velasquez painted but very few pictures now as you'll see momentarily Keith and I did not coordinate our presentations in any way which will lead to the following section which repeats what he had the same pictures by Velasquez in New York and this is the supper at Emmaus which is hanging in the gallery our old friend Juan de pareja I do want to point something out in this portrait this is clearly one of the great portraits that Velasquez ever created Velasquez is genius as a painter is the extraordinary economy with which he achieves magnificent effects now the next time you go up into the gallery to look at this portrait I want you to notice two things in particular I want you to notice the definition of his ear when you move up close to the painting all you see is a rather undefined area of red paint in other words what you're looking at is a blob but the brought the eye reads it as an ear no problem as Velasquez realizes that when you focus you review any one thing what you see along the periphery of that view loses some of its definition take another look at this hand when you go up until galleries and look at his hands you will say my god that's a claw that's not a hand and you can see it even here but then again he knew that this commanding presence the pose the facial expression were the secondary primary elements in the picture and that he could get away so to speak with doing just almost the kind of notional representation of the other parts of the body this is Maria Teresa here this is probably a workshop model and with wonderful these kind of butterfly here adornments that she uses this is this little bolt of lightening is actually a king a white plume that was born in fashion and then you see how he leads the IR out here's the butterfly fully defined now it instantly simplified simplified simplified turns the corner and again we're looking at blobs but the eyes been conditioned to look to make the transition from this to this without thinking about the enormous pictorial distance that has been covered Keith also mentioned this portrait of Philip the fourth now under study and the portrait of the Conde Duque de all the valleys and I have to confess that I have in one of the doubters but then again I doubted the portrait has just been rediscovered so there's always room for error in fact the more time you spend studying something the more room for error using defined now we look at their eyes as Keith mentioned a total of eight paintings by Velasquez in New York that's what New York collections which amounts to seven percent of his total output and now we've moved uptown to Broadway in 150 Fifth Street to the Hispanic Society of America we receive Alaska sits great patron McHale Duke of Olive Ivy's one of the first portraits that he does after his appointment in 1623 at the Court hears a small charming very unusual work in Alaska cease production of a little girl and has as the portrait in the Med and you can see it very clearly only the head and face are fully defined and then it drops off into the realm of kind of statue and then as a companion to Fonda padishah portrait of Cardinal oz Stolley painted in the same year as Juan de patatas 1650 and a great great masterpiece by Velasquez and then finally we conclude our Velasquez tour of New York by going to the Frick and this undoubtedly is the great masterpiece among the works by Velasquez in New York collections the portrait of the king Velasquez page which filled the fourth painting in 1644 picture that was indicated was in Michael Gallagher studio at the same time as the head by Velasquez and I must say proved with this picture very well-known featured at all of the literature on the Frick Collection but with the removal of the slightly discolored varnish it just came to life in ways that were absolutely stunning we know that the picture was painted in three days which is a record for Velasquez and was painted in difficult conditions just off the battlefield but the Frick is publishing a complete study of the restoration of this work now unfinished works are by no means unusual in Velasquez erv I'm going to show you just a few of them this is a portrait of a young man in Munich a work of the early 1620s and here you can see just the outline this was characteristic Velasquez working method of outlining the composition with these strokes of blacks over the hand you can't really make it out but his his hand is resting on his hip that's his hand and then here he's meant to be holding his sword and even though it looks like the pommel of the sword and even though it doesn't look like much at all once I tell you what it is you can see exactly what he means to represent this is a portrait in Dresden of the master of the Royal Hunt Juan Mateos and here this is again you can see that the hands have not been brought to finish with this is actually what he's doing here is holding on to the handle of a pistol this is a cat major now to clearly in this but this is a belt from which are he has a pistol suspended and his hand isn't finished so move on to the picture I showed you a moment ago of a young woman selling and she yeah she always I'm sorry we don't want to watch every this is a portrait of a famous Spanish sculptor von muktinath montagnier and here he is working on a bust of Philip the fourth you can see the tell-tale upturned mustachio which was all the fashion at the court at the time but while the portrait of the sculptor is finished you can see this part here has just been left in outline this is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington it shows a young woman sewing very unusual subject for the harvest and you can see once again at the head and the hair are finished but the hands and she's obviously working on some embroidery are just given the most briefest description here's a sketch of the second wife second consort of Philip fourth Mariana the Austria in the meadows Museum this elaborate wig that she wears and then again the face is highly finished but the costume has really just begun and left unfinished this was probably intended to be used again as a workshop model and then this is a portrait of Philip the fourth in the National Gallery of Art it was painted again to be used in the workshop it's the one thinking I wish he hadn't painted because everybody who sees it says oh he looks just like you but there you are and again the head is fully developed and then the costume is just sketched in then and there is yet a later Modelo for the workshop which is in the National Gallery in London so the portraits are not unusual unfinished portraits are not unusual nevertheless the painting which has just been really buted to Velasquez is unusual in one respect it is a preparatory study for one of Alaska's masterpiece visas the surrender of Breda let me give you a little bit of background information on the Commission for the surrender of Breda it was intended to be the principal gallery in a pleasure palace that Philip the fourth built on the outskirts of Madrid during the 1630s this is a plan you can see it was built around an old gothic church the Church of Center Adoni mall and it consisted of these inter of these courtyards where different events were taking place they were looking at it from a slightly different angle but this is the palace with its two pluses and then the elaborate gardens that were planted just to orient you if you're familiar with Madrid today the this this Church of Scientology most still exists but all of this section here is occupied by the prado museum now in this principal gallery so-called Hall of realms which is just here here and here but Conde Duque de olivarez commissioned a cycle of paintings commemorating the great military victories of Philip the 4th and this was known as the Hall of realms this is a virtual rican be the hall of realms was decorated with a series of twelve military victories won by the armies of Philip fourth this is the king you barely make him out fill up the fourth this is his consort is available they bought bong the battle scenes have seen here between the windows and then above the labors of Hercules painted by the renowned Spanish Golden Age painter Francisco de su Oberon and this was the intended place for the installation of Velasquez painting of the surrender of Breda this is a surrender of Breda which you see here let me just briefly describe to you what is going on the siege itself took place as one of the major battles of the 30 Years War which won from 1618 to 1648 and Breda was a Dutch fortress which gave access to the Netherlands and was a very key strategic site in 1624 the Spanish army under the command of general Ambrogio Spinola Genoese who worked at who was one of philip ii fours general laid siege to the town of Breda which you see here in the background and eventually the Spanish army was able to starve out the garrison and the city capitulated as the soldiers withdrew you can see here there this is a Velasquez rendition of the surrender scene you'll see in a moment that it actually looked very different than what you see here but here is the defeated Protestant general Justin of Nassau who is offering the keys to the city as a sign of surrender to the Spanish general spino log Bojo Spinola buts being allah instead of accepting the keys lays a conciliatory hand on the shoulder of Justin of Nassau in other words he is showing his respect for the military prowess and bravery and courage of his valiant Dutch opponents here on the left then are the Dutch troops and they are where their strong standards Pike's with orange flags orange banners this was a symbol of the house of orange-nassau the Dutch troops and over here on the right is a contingent of the victorious Spanish army featuring the famous motif of these Lance's of pipes which are shooting up into the sky fence like a kind of symbolism of the invincibility of Spanish arms now the victory as they say was a famous one and it was broadcast all over Europe in 1626 of Flemish Jesuit Hermann you go wrote an extensive description of the siege which lasted for several months and was visited in fact by the governor of the Netherland Isabella Plata Alania the odd of Philip the fourth this is her banner just here the checkered flag has nothing to do with NASCAR it is the symbol of the colors of the Infanta and then you see here in a kind of cluster of heads who are the Spanish generals who assisted the Ambrogio Spinola in the military maneuvers that led to the Spanish to the Spanish victory now in fact we know from the first place that Velasquez approach to a surrender scene was extremely unusual this is another of the pictures in the Hall of realms by a young contemporary of Alaska sits the same general Ambrogio Spinola and here an identifiable face of the marquis de llegar neighs a high-ranking Spanish nobleman and in this case as you can see the surrender scene is a scene in which the defeated this is another battle about a village in which the defeated general kneels down in obeisance he is vanquished and his pose shows that he is indeed a loser now here's how the surrender of Breda actually looked one of the commemorative acts of was taken was the commission of a gigantic engraving by Jim the famous french and printmaker jacques callo and he follows literally the surrender was the fact that Dutch would be allowed to withdraw not in hasty retreat but could march out from the Citadel with their colors flying Alaska subversion of course is entirely made up what happened here is not what truly happened there and it's part of his conception of the surrender scene which to those who are versed in the history make it so unusual and he emphasizes the unusual quality by showing this hindquarters of a horse prominently displayed and for a very long time there was no one was able to figure out why literally the horse's ass should be given such a prominent place in this picture I'm happy to say that it was figured out by myself and my collaborator John so John Eliot the significance is that of the horses that spinal is not sitting on it in other words in honor of his opponent he has dismounted and and a little scene that unfolds is painted now this Spanish troops are here and there this cluster of heads this is John of Nassau this is the Marquis de ballet I saw this is a Spanish general Carlos Coloma they were all known their appearances were all known through prints and paintings a portraits which had been executed you'll notice though and of course none of the soldiers wear uniforms uniforms facts tent uniform neither uniforms were standing armies really came into existence until the end of the 17th century and soldiers wore whatever clothes they had but we know obviously this is the Spanish side this is a Dutch side but standing over here is that soldier with a rifle on design he looks out over here is a Spanish soldier you can actually if you follow down is the high boost or a characteristic of Spanish the Spanish dress the Dutch more floppy boots for historians of military uniforms have made all of these distinctions clear and then you notice just through the opening here in the foreground you see the Dutch troops that are marching how now the metropolitan portrait has been associated with this gentleman right here and I believe in fact that they are one in the same in other words the painting the rediscovered Velasquez is directly related to the famous painting of the surrender of Breda it is unusual for Velasquez to make preparatory studies of any kind for any of his pictures he painted in a manner known as our Prima I'll just give you a startling example this is a religious he also done for the Retiro during the same period and here is how the ex radiographed looks in other words if you were if I were to just to show you of a painting on the radiograph on the left and say which of who's the artist you say where's the picture and liquid colors and he's painting directly on the canvas with no preliminary study that's what he's about see small adjustments that are being made all of the time but to surrender Breda is a rather different kind of Commission this on the left is the is the x-ray dia graph of the surrender of Breda it's a different kind of commission and a kind of Commission in Velasquez had never had to paint before nor would he paint again first of all it's a very large picture second it's a battle scene and this is the kind of picture as I say this is the one and only example sort of a balancing into the last kisses works over thee and since had to prepare for this picture in ways that are not could you focus the slide on the right please he had to prepare for this picture in ways that he was really unaccustomed to do and the proof of it is this drawing which is in the video taken Nacional in Madrid but there are very very few drawings by Velasquez given his working method of painting directly from his mind to the canvas there was no need but he was obviously experimenting this drawing on the verso are the only known drawings that we have that are preparatory to the completion of a large painting similarly the painting in the metropolitan it has to be understood again as unique because we know really we know no other picture for which a preparatory oil study exists this is the soldier here on the left and this is the preparatory study of the man on the right you'll notice it's very hard portrait identification is one of the Bugaboos of historians of art and in order to forge a useful tool for determining whether through painted portraits of this represent the same person I formulated what I call the five-second rule and by the five-second rule I mean to say that if the resemblance is not immediately apparent if you start to have to explain why two representations represent a single four person and they've almost certainly do not but in this case it seems to me that the comparison this painting satisfies at least my interpretation of the five-second rule and you'll notice in particular there's a little his little bump on his nose and here's the same bump on his nose just here so that's just one detail of many that could be pointed out why would you do this portrait of a given individual and then incorporate it into his finished painting well I think that it has to do the fact that surrender of Breda as I've showed you contains a number of portraits of individuals and I think what he wanted to do was not to make up the appearance of his soldier on the right he wanted to use a live model so that it would appear to be alive he could use almost anybody of a certain age and that means that the identification of the sitter in my opinion will probably never be known however the connection of the met newly attributed met portrait to the figure here seems it was just somebody another person who worked in the palace and who Velasquez pulled over for a quick study so to speak one day and produced this really magnificent lively vibrant portrait and the fact that it's done and Michael Gallagher has eloquently displayed how it's done shows us Velasquez style his execution his means of expression in its purest form this is Velasquez distilled very high proof drink indeed and in this portrait we see as we do in no other how he brings to life an individual gives him form presence and importance although in fact the portrait is small it is huge in conception and execution thank you you

Channel: The Met

Views: 180,001

Rating: 4.462141 out of 5

Keywords: Velázquez, Metropolitan, Museum, of, art, mma_exhibition, Jonathan, Brown, Keith, Christiansen, Michael, Gallagher

Id: U1Tf3ynbCzQ

Length: 70min 12sec (4212 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 09 2010