Zurbarán at National Gallery shows two discoveries and 15m altarpiece
The national gallery in London is mounting a Zurbarán exhibition built around two newly discovered paintings and a reconstructed tier from a 15m altarpiece. The survey is meant to show that Francisco de Zurbarán’s output ran far beyond the saint paintings for which he is best known.
Daniel Sobrino Ralston on the new works
Two newly discovered paintings are among the show’s main draws, and Daniel Sobrino Ralston called them “One of the real highlights of the exhibition.” He added that it “will be the opportunity to see two newly discovered paintings.” One is Alcarraza on a Plate, dating from around 1650 or earlier; the other newly attributed works depict ceramic objects that appear together in Still Life with Four Vessels, which dates from around 1650.
A version of Still Life with Four Vessels lent by the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya will also be in the exhibition. The setup gives visitors a direct way to compare the small, detailed studies with the larger version they were turned into, instead of treating Zurbarán’s still-life work as a side note to his religious painting.
Charterhouse of Jerez de la Frontera
The exhibition will bring together a single tier of an altarpiece from the Charterhouse of Jerez de la Frontera that would have been 15m tall. For the first time in about 175 years, the second tier of that altarpiece will be reconstructed. Ralston said, “One of the great achievements is to bring together a single tier of this amazing altarpiece from the Charterhouse of Jerez de la Frontera, which would have been 15m tall.”
That reconstruction matters because it restores scale to paintings that were made to be read as parts of a larger church setting. Ralston said, “With that, you get a sense of the scale of how these paintings might have been received, walking into that church.”
Zurbarán after Seville
Zurbarán was born in 1598 and died in 1664, and the exhibition argues that his late years moved “in quite a different direction” from the decline often attached to him. Ralston described the late works as “softer and more intimate in tone,” and the show will place them beside large religious commissions from his Seville years, when he was “the toast of all of Andalucía, taking commissions from everywhere.”
That mix is the point of the survey. The National Gallery has not mounted a Zurbarán exhibition on this scale since 1987, and this one uses still-lifes, devotional paintings, and major commissions to push back against the narrow image of the artist as only a painter of austere saints.
