How Madrid, and Velázquez, taught me to appreciate art
Room 30 of London’s National Gallery is hardly off the beaten track. From the Central Hall you wonder past Canaletto, take a left at Turner and then again at the 17th Century Italians. It’s a matter of a minute and yet it always feels somewhat overlooked, far from the madding crowd.
And this is good, because tucked away in one corner of the National’s Spanish collection is the Rokeby Venus. There is a comfortable bench in front of her and one afternoon in March I take a seat and spend some time indulging myself in a growing obsession: the paintings of Diego Velázquez. I have him, and her, more or less to myself. It is heaven.
The Rokeby Venus, painted in 1647 is so named for the Durham country house in which it hung for most of the 19th Century. It is London’s most celebrated Velázquez and his only surviving nude. Like many of his most acclaimed works there is both challenge and a sense of interaction with the world. The face of Venus, blurred and indistinct, stares into a mirror, not at herself but, like the infanta Margarita in Las Meninas, back at the painter and the viewer. I stay for half an hour but it could be longer. Velázquez invites lengthy contemplation. His portraits never display just a face, but an entire personality and life story.
Alongside Venus is Felipe IV, all Hapsburg chin and awkward nobility. I have mixed feelings about Felipe. His was a tough reign, managing foreign wars and domestic decline. The portraits of Velázquez, who was an important administrator in the court as well as its most celebrated artist, chart the King’s trajectory from youthful hope to tired disappointment. In her marvellous book “The Vanishing Man” the art critic Laura Cumming writes: “The greatest achievement of Philip’s life was to employ Velázquez.”
Without Felipe’s patronage, there may be no Velázquez. Equally, if the painter had spent less time counting beans for the King, we would have a far greater wealth of his work.
I found Velázquez, as so many do, in Madrid where he’s not hiding in a side room. Madrid is a city that opens even the most untrained and disinterested eye to art. I moved here a decade ago with little appreciation, but the museums are irresistible.
The Thyssen collection might be the world’s most accessible art history tour. I first went there to see Henry VIII, more in search of Hilary Mantel than Hans Holbein. I can never go to the Reina Sofía without stopping in on Dalí’s Young Woman in a Window. Sorolla’s house is a personal favourite. The watercolours of Valencia’s beaches are marvellous but his family paintings move the soul. Find someone who loves you as much as Sorolla loved his Clotilde.
And then there is the Prado, the jewel in Madrid’s crown. At first its scale and grandeur are intimidating. Where does one start in such a treasure trove?
Fortune intervened. In early 2019, I was invited to a private tour and supper. A guide whisked us through Rubens, Bosch and Goya until we finally found ourselves in front of Las Meninas. There we dwelled a good long time learning something of Velázquez and his unique talent, and much about the painting, its meanings and its messages. And there I learned something of how to look, appreciate and love art. And I fell in love with Velázquez.
There’s no painting in the world that is harder to walk away from. And the longer you look at it, the harder it becomes because the painting looks back. The piercing eyes of the Infanta; the quizzical face of the master himself; even Felipe in the mirror in the background. “The figures of the past keep looking into our moment,” writes Cumming. And I keep looking for Velázquez.
So four years later, I am in the National Gallery, with Felipe and Venus. On the way out, I stop to look at Goya’s Wellington, but the Duke doesn’t do it for me in the way that even Felipe does. Goya’s canvass is a portrait, a great one, but Velázquez tells a story.
The Iron Duke, as it happens, had a couple of Velázquez canvasses of his own, found among other loot in the abandoned baggage train of Joseph Bonaparte after his defeat at the battle of Vitoria. As soon as he knew what he had – 83 canvasses stolen from the Spanish Crown – Wellington ordered them sent back to Ferdinand VII. The new King refused his offer. And so my next trip is to Apsley House to spend time with The Water Seller of Sevilla, the Portrait of a Man. And Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, the genius hidden in plain sight.
This is the text of an article published in the British Spanish Society magazine, Revista.
https://www.britishspanishsociety.org/la-revista/