Miguel Zugaza To Step Down as Director of Prado for Bilbao
Press release (30 November 2016) from the Prado:
This morning, Miguel Zugaza informed the Permanent Committee of the Royal Board of Trustees of his decision to conclude his term next year as director of the Museo del Prado after fifteen years in the position. He also announced his intention to reassume the post of director of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum on the retirement of its present director.
In a text addressed to Iñigo Méndez de Vigo, the Minister of Education, Culture and Sport, and to Unai Rementeria, Chairman of the Provincial Council of Bizkaia, Miguel Zugaza stated that he “considers the goals established during his term of office to have been fulfilled and expresses his thanks for all the support received.” The Museum’s Director for the past fifteen years considers that “the Museum is now embarking on a new and exciting phase with the focus on its bicentenary and on the completion of the Museo del Prado Campus with the addition of the Hall of Realms.” At the same time, he considers himself “extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to return to the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum (of which he was director between 1995 and 2001) and offer it all the experience he has acquired.”
The Minister of Education, Culture and Sport has personally thanked Miguel Zugaza for the services he has rendered the Museum over so many years and has asked him to continue to be involved in its bicentenary project through the Committee for the 2nd centenary of the Museo Nacional del Prado in 2019.
For his part and in the name of the Bilbao museum’s founding institutions (the City Council of Bilbao, the Provincial Government of Bizkaia and the Basque Government), the Chairman of the Provincial Council of Bizkaia and current president of the Bilbao museum’s Board of Trustees expressed his satisfaction at being able to count on Miguel Zugaza for leading the museum forward after the outstanding contribution made over the past years by Javier Viar Olloqui. Both institutions have agreed to stay in contact in order to facilitate the transition of directorship of the respective museums. With this aim in mind, the Minister will propose to the Prado’s Royal Board of Trustees the creation of a specific committee at the Museum. As established in its statutes, it will initiate the selection procedure prior to the proposal of a new appointment to the Council of Ministers. Mr Zugaza will remain in his position with all the powers authorised by it until a new director is appointed.
José Pedro Pérez-Llorca, president of the Museum’s Royal Board of Trustees, wished to emphasise that “the Museo del Prado will never be able to sufficiently express its thanks to Miguel Zugaza for his intelligence, wisdom and imagination and the authority with which he has led the Museum”, and that “the results of his efforts, namely the great success of the Prado, speak for themselves.”
New Book | A Golden Age of European Art
From Yale UP:
Edited by James Clifton and Melina Kervandjian with essays by Barbara Baert, Andrea Bayer, Anne Dunlop, Steven Ostrow, Lisa Pon, Martin Postle, and Arthur K. Wheelock, A Golden Age of European Art: Celebrating Fifty Years of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-0300207811, $65.
Marking the 50th anniversary of the acclaimed Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, this commemorative book presents masterpieces from the foundation’s collection. The works span more than 400 years, from the 16th through the early 20th century, and feature a range of media including paintings, prints, and printed books. After a comprehensive introduction to the foundation and its collection, essays by eight scholars present new scholarship on key works. The featured objects include an image of the Madonna and Child by the Florentine painter Giuliano Bugiardini; Richard Wilson’s iconic 18th-century composition The White Monk; printed materials in Venice that bridged Jewish and Christian cultures; and portraits by Paolo Veronese, Simon Vouet, and others. With more than 200 illustrations, this beautiful publication is a rich survey as well as a timely celebration of this exceptional collection.
James Clifton is director of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation and curator of Renaissance and Baroque painting at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Prado Commission Awarded to Norman Foster and Carlos Rubio
Foster + Partners and Rubio Arquitectura, ‘Hidden Design’: Winning Proposal for the Restoration and Remodeling of the Salón de Reinos Museo del Prado, announced November 2016.
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Press release (24 November 2016) from the Prado:
Architects Norman Foster and Carlos Rubio have been announced as winners of the projects competition to remodel the Hall of Realms at the Museo del Prado. The Museum will exhibit the winning proposal along with those of the other seven teams of finalists from 1 December.
Iñígo Méndez de Vigo, Minister of Education, Culture and Sport, led the plenary meeting of the Royal Board of Trustees of the Museo del Prado in which the jury announced the winner of the international competition for the architectural restoration and museological remodelling of the Salón de Reinos [Hall of Realms] of the former Buen Retiro palace. The winning proposal is the one presented by the team of Foster + Partners LTD and Rubio Arquitectura SLP, as decided at the jury’s meeting on 22 November.
The winning proposal, entitled Hidden Design, makes maximum use of the building’s museological aspect and creates a large entrance atrium on the south façade, making this space semi-open and permeable to the exterior but sufficiently controlled for it to function to protect the original façade of the Hall of Realms, the windows and balconies of which will be reinstated. Emerging over the top of this façade will be a large exhibition space on the third floor, which is higher and wider than the present one, forming the roof of the atrium and a terrazza facing the Museum’s ‘campus’. The winning design fully responds to the spatial requirements specified by the Museum for this project, without the need to excavate new basement levels. It emphasises the historical spaces that form the core of the building, particularly the Hall of Realms. Similarly, it strengthens and consolidates the identity of the Museo del Prado campus, proposing a pedestrian section of the Retiro Park—Paseo del Prado axis along calle Felipe IV which will revitalise its connection with the city.
In its decision statement the jury singled out the principal merits of this project as the high quality of the architectural proposal, which respects and emphasises the pre-existing structure, adapting it to present-day requirements; the intelligent way in which this project meets museological requirements; the skilled integration of the building into its surroundings and into the overall context of the Museo del Prado campus; and the project’s efficient cost study.
The aim of the competition of which the winner has now been announced and which was originally published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado on 1 March 2016, was to select the architectural team to devise the project to restore and refit the Hall of Realms, part of the lost Buen Retiro palace and the former home of the Museo del Ejército [Army Museum]. This building was formerly passed to the Museo del Prado in October 2015.
The competition, entered by 47 teams of architects, has consisted of two parts. The first, open part ended in June with the selection of eight teams:
• CRUZ Y ORTIZ ARQUITECTOS, SLP
• NIETO SOBEJANO ARQUITECTOS, SLP
• UTE: B720 ARQUITECTURA, SL – DAVID CHIPPERFIELD ARCHITECTS
• OFFICE FOR METROPOLITAN ARCHITECTURE (OMA) STEDEBOUW BV
• UTE: SOUTO MOURA ARQUITECTOS, SA – JUAN MIGUEL HERNÁNDEZ LEÓN – CARLOS DE RIAÑO LOZANO
• UTE: FOSTER + PARTNERS LTD – RUBIO ARQUITECTURA SLP
• UTE: GARCES DE SETA BONET ARQUITECTES, SLP – PEDRO FEDUCHI CANOSA
• UTE: GLUCKMAN TANG ARCHITECTS LLP – ESTUDIO ÁLVAREZ SALA, SLP – ARQUITECTURA ENGUITA Y LASSO DE LA VEGA, SLP
These teams devised their proposals for the second phase, presenting them on 31 October. In its decision statement, jury singled out the quality of all the projects presented, which will be displayed in the Cloister of the Museum’s Jerónimos Building from 1 December. Preparation of the project will commence in 2017 and is expected to take about 16 months. Building work will begin in 2018.
UTE: Foster + Partners LTD – Rubio Arquitectura SLP
This is a temporary alliance of the architectural studios Foster + Partners and Rubio Arquitectura. Foster + Partners was founded in 1967 by Norman Foster (born Manchester, 1935). With its headquarters in London, it has offices in 14 cities around the world including Hong Kong, New York, São Paulo, Singapore, and Madrid. Among Foster + Partners’ most important projects for museums are those undertaken for the Carré d’Art (Nîmes, 1993), the Great Court and Sainsbury Galleries in the British Museum (London, 2000), the Robert and Alene Kogod Courtyard at the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C., 2007), the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, 2010), the Lenbachhaus (Munich, 2013), and the Imperial War Museum (London, 2014). Among numerous awards and honours, Norman Foster received the Pritzker Prize in 1999, the Mies van der Rohe Award for Contemporary Architecture in 1990, and the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects in 1994. The Prince of Asturias Prize for the Arts in 2009 recognised his entire career as an architect.
Rubio Arquitectura was founded in 2014 by the architect Carlos Rubio Carvajal (born Barcelona, 1950) and has its headquarters in Madrid. The studio is currently working on various projects in Spain and abroad, including Russia and Saudi Arabia. Awards include the COAM Architecture Prize in 1989.
Workshop | Etching for Curators and Researchers
From the workshop flyer:
Etching: A Practice-Based Workshop for Curators and Researchers
Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, Suffolk, 29–30 March 2017
Convened by Jason Hicklin and Peter Moore
Join us for a two-day workshop at Gainsborough’s House that will bring together professionals whose work deals with prints—and in particular, etchings. Through a series of practical sessions in the Gainsborough’s House Print Workshop, accompanied by discussions around works from the collection, participants will gain a better appreciation of the materiality of etchings and a more nuanced understanding of how these processes have been applied and adapted by different artists at different times. The conception of this workshop represents a methodological shift in the academic study of prints, in which object-led and practice-based forms of research are increasingly recognised as valuable components of an art-historical education—especially for those who care for or interpret prints in a curatorial capacity.
Day one (Wednesday) will explore the processes of hard ground and soft ground etching. The first of these techniques, developed in the early sixteenth century, was mastered by artists such as Dürer and Rembrandt and came to occupy a central role in the history of western European art. The innovation of soft ground etching occurred later, in the second half of the eighteenth century, and was particularly popular in Britain; Gainsborough was among its earliest pioneers.
Day two (Thursday) will focus on aquatint, developed in the 1770s. As a tonal method, aquatint presented printmakers with a range of new possibilities for image making. Since its conception, it has been considered as a complementary technique to soft ground etching, and Gainsborough often used it in this way. The popularity of aquatint has continued into the modern era, with the sugar-lift process being favoured by Picasso.
The course will be jointly convened by Jason Hicklin, Lead Tutor and Head of Printmaking at the City & Guilds of London Art School, and Dr Peter Moore, Research Curator at Gainsborough’s House. Each day will run from 10am to 4pm. The cost is £180 (inc. VAT) and includes lunch and refreshments, but not accommodation. For further enquiries and to reserve your place, please contact peter@gainsborough.org. Limited places are available, so early booking is advised.
New Book | Chinese and Japanese Works of Art in the Royal Collection
Published by the Royal Collection Trust and distributed in the U.S. and Canada by Chicago:
John Ayers, Chinese and Japanese Works of Art in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen, 3 volumes (London: Royal Collection Trust, 2016), 1296 pages, ISBN: 978-1905686490, £150 / $250.
The Royal Collection includes some of the most important examples of Eastern applied art in the Western world, reflecting the West’s long-standing appetite for rarities from distant lands. With more than 2,000 objects distributed across the royal residences in England and Scotland, the collection represents a rich cross-section of Chinese and Japanese porcelains, jades, lacquers, and other works of art.
This three-volume catalogue raisonné covers this substantial and important collection in comprehensive detail. It includes for the first time the many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century bronze mounts that are such a striking feature of the collection. Made in French and British workshops to enhance the objects they display, the mounts themselves are often of superb quality and of great historical importance.
More than 2,400 colour images are used to illustrate the collection, including intricate decorative details and makers’ marks. Introductory essays cover the history and development of the collection and the ways in which these works of art have been displayed in the royal palaces and adapted according to the fashions of the day.
Volume One presents the Chinese ceramics of the Ming and Qing dynasties in chronological order (continued in Volume Two). In addition, due to their unique historical significance, the contents of the collection at Hampton Court Palace are presented here separately. Volume Two continues the works of the Qing dynasty, and ends with the Japanese works; the volume also contains a special focus on the European mounts that were added to works of Chinese and Japanese porcelain during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Volume Three contains non-porcelain works, namely lacquer, jade and other hardstones, carved ivories, textiles and metalwork. Many of these works came into the Royal Collection as Imperial gifts, to George III, Queen Victoria, King Edward VII, and Queen Alexandra, with the exception of the Japanese lacquer wares, which were acquired for George IV to furnish the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. Although not much studied, these pieces were admired by the royal family, and Chinese rooms were created at Windsor and Sandringham House, decorated with an eclectic mixture of European chinoiserie and authentic works of Asian art.
Buckingham Palace Slated for £369Million Renovation
Buckingham Palace, London. The East Front, originally constructed by Edward Blore and completed in 1850, acquired its present appearance following a remodeling in 1913 by Sir Aston Webb (Photo by David Iliff, April 2009, License: CC-BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons).
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As reported by Stephen Castle for The New York Times (19 November 2016) . . .
The boilers are shot, the water pipes sag, and the 60-year-old cabling is a fire hazard. Buckingham Palace, home to Queen Elizabeth II, may not exactly be falling down, but it badly needs refurbishing, the British government said on Friday, citing “a serious risk of fire, flood and damage.” Renovations on the building will start in April and will take a decade to complete, at a cost of £369 million ($456 million). The announcement adds to the list of prestigious structures in Britain that need work, including the crumbling Palace of Westminster, home of the British Parliament.
The building that would become Buckingham Palace was built in the early 1700s and became a royal residence when George III bought it in 1761. The queen carries out most of her official ceremonial and diplomatic duties as head of state in the palace. She would not have to move out while the work was in progress, officials said. . . .
The full article is available here»
Writing for The Guardian, Caroline Davies addresses in more detail the financial arrangements, including the controversies around spending £369 million in a time of austerity.
The Morgan Launches Refreshed Website
Press release (17 November 2016) from The Morgan:
The Morgan Library & Museum today announced the launch of a refreshed website. The updated look for themorgan.org offers a sleek, contemporary design, and also introduces features that make the site more compatible across platforms: mobile, tablet, and desktop computers. The unveiling of the new design coincides with the ten-year anniversary of the Morgan’s 2006 expansion, and is the first major makeover since then.
Digital initiatives at the Morgan are part of a larger strategic undertaking to expand access to the institution’s holdings. The upgrades to the Morgan’s website represent a significant development for scholars, students, and members of the general public interested in accessing the Morgan’s vast collections. Prior to undertaking digitization initiatives, the Morgan’s collection had been available on a select basis onsite at the museum’s New York headquarters, while some of the works have been published in various museum catalogs. Digitization efforts enable access to the collection from anywhere in the world and includes a zoom feature to study individual works in detail.
In recent years, almost 700 music manuscripts from its extraordinary collection—represented by such masters as Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and Handel—have been digitized and made available on its website. The museum’s most ambitious undertaking—the digitization of its collection of over 14,500 drawings —began in Fall 2013, and as of today over 95% of this undertaking is complete, including a cache of over 500 Rembrandt prints and etchings. Additionally, the Morgan offers online access to illuminations from 823 Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts (including over 20,000 illuminations) and thousands of highlights from literary and historical manuscripts, rare books, and ancient near eastern seals and tablets, which can be rotated and zoomed. In the past six months, highlights that have been added include the entire collection of the Morgan’s Coptic bindings and the Lindau Gospels.
Looking ahead, the Morgan plans to continue sharing more objects from its vast collections through the website. Collections ranging from early Mesopotamian and Egyptian through Greco-Roman culture, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and beyond, will be further represented on the website. The music manuscripts pages will also be upgraded to provide more download options and improved navigation.
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Luigi Valadier, Drawing of an inkstand in Rococo Style, 1764, pen and brown ink, with brown and red wash, over graphite, on paper, 37.5 × 52.4 cm (New York: The Morgan Library & Museum, 1991.15, purchased on the Sunny Crawford von Bülow Fund 1978). Multiple filters (including ‘centuries’) accommodate collection searches.
British Miniatures on View at Compton Verney
As noted at Art Daily (15 November 2016). . .
The Dumas Collection of British Portrait Miniatures
Compton Verney Art Gallery and Park, Warwickshire
Over forty miniature paintings, not previously seen in public, have now gone on show at Compton Verney Art Gallery and Park in Warwickshire. The works are part one of the most important collections of this art form held anywhere in the world. The collection consists of 842 works in total and has been generously loaned on a permanent basis by Simon Dumas following the death of his father in 2013.
Simon Dumas said: “We wanted Dad’s exceptionally broad and, in the context of miniatures, important collection to be in the Midlands and not in London, Cambridge, or Oxford—since the Victoria and Albert Museum and National Portrait Gallery, the Fitzwilliam and the Ashmolean already have such wonderfully rich resources to display. We approached Compton Verney because they already have a fine collection of English portraits, which we thought Dad’s mainly English collection would complement well.”
Upon his retirement from a successful career in the City, Dumas’s firm, ED&F Man Capital Markets, gave him and his wife a round-the-world trip as a leaving present. It was on a wet day in Canada that the couple visited an art gallery that happened to be staging an exhibition of miniatures.
“They captivated Dad, who at the time was vaguely looking around for an indoor hobby for his retirement. He asked a curator where these little paintings were from, only to learn that they were from his own country, England. He started collecting almost immediately on their return from their trip in 1975, with the objective—impossible to achieve, but still a reference point—of acquiring an example, signed if possible, by every artist who ever worked in the British Isles,” Simon explained.
With his enthusiasm fired, Dumas developed and added to his collection over the next thirty years.
The advent of photography and its ability to capture people’s likenesses relatively cheaply and led to the rapid decline of the portrait miniature from about 1850 onwards. Miniatures were often carried around or worn as a necklace or brooch but, because of the skill required to create them, were expensive to commission. Deeply personal and available only to the wealthier echelons of society, miniatures were rarely seen by the greater public; consequently, miniature painting is not a well-known aspect of art—albeit that it flourished for some three centuries.
Steven Parissien, Director of Compton Verney, believes the Dumas loan makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the British tradition of miniature portraits: “We are delighted that this world-class collection of outstanding British portrait miniatures has finally come back to England from Scotland, allowing us to share in the hidden delights of this most intimate and touching form of portraiture—as well as to learn much about their Stuart and Georgian sitters.”
Highlights include Lucas Horenbout’s Unknown Lady, painted ca. 1543. Sir Roy Strong has suggested that the sitter was King Henry VIII’s sixth and last wife, Queen Catherine (Parr). Horenbout worked for Henry VIII from 1525 and is said to have taught Holbein how to paint miniatures—thus introducing this skill into Britain. Catherine herself died aged 36, five years after this portrait was painted, giving birth to a child by her fourth husband.
The celebrated Elizabethan and Jacobean painter Nicholas Hilliard is also represented, with Unknown Gentleman (1589). Hilliard made portrait miniatures popular in Britain, largely due to the patronage of Queen Elizabeth I herself. Having helped create fashionable images of the Virgin Queen and her court—one of whose members may be depicted here—Hilliard became the royal miniaturist (‘court limner’) to her successor, James I.
Also of note are the works of six female artists, including the exceptional Sarah Biffin (1784–1850). Born without hands, arms, or feet, Sarah taught herself to paint and write by using her mouth. Apprenticed by her family to a man who exhibited her round the country as a sideshow freak, she simultaneously taught herself how to paint miniatures. She was rescued by the Earl of Morton, who sponsored formal painting lessons for her at the Royal Academy, and she built up a large practice painting miniatures as a result of Queen Victoria’s patronage.
Having just visited the national gallery in Warwickshire to see the first selection from the collection on display, Simon Dumas says he is very pleased that his father’s collection has found the ideal place for members of the public to enjoy them: “I hope the miniatures stay for many years in the beautiful surroundings of Compton Verney, where they are displayed so very well in the newly-made cabinet alongside the British paintings of the permanent collection. The display is far better than those in some of the London galleries in my opinion!”
The Dumas Loan can be seen in the British Portraits gallery at Compton Verney, along with remarkable collections such as the nationally-designated Chinese Bronzes and Britain’s best collection of British Folk Art.
Anna Marie Roos on a Portrait of Martin Folkes
From The Societies of Antiquaries of London:
Anna Marie Roos on a Portrait of Martin Folkes
Society of Antiquaries of London, Unlocking Our Collections, added 1 November 2016
Jonathan Richardson the Elder, Portrait of Martin Folkes, 1718, oil on canvas (Society of Antiquaries of London).
This is a portrait of Martin Folkes (1690–1754), the only person to have been President of both the Society of Antiquaries of London and of the Royal Society. What would being President of a society dedicated to the material past have to do with leading a society dedicated to science? In the 18th century, the ability to observe nature was thought to make scientists ideal to understand the empirical details of ancient artefacts and how they were created. Science and archaeology were seen as one, the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Society had many common members and held their meetings on the same day, and Folkes tried to unite the two groups into one organisation. If he had succeeded, the humanities and sciences would perhaps be more united today. . . .
Anna Marie Roos is Reader at College of Arts, University of Lincoln.
The full essay, with a video and suggestions for further reading, is available here»
Acquisition Appeal | Thomas Lawrence’s Unfinished Portrait Wellington
An appeal from the NPG:
Sir Thomas Lawrence, Unfinished Portrait of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, 1829, oil on canvas, 94.3 × 74.3 cm (Private Collection).
The National Portrait Gallery has launched a public appeal to acquire Sir Thomas Lawrence’s unfinished final portrait of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, it was announced today, Thursday 3 November 2016. The portrait has been offered to the National Portrait Gallery for £1.3 million. The appeal was kick started today by a donation of £350,000 from the Art Fund, whose generous support means that alongside the Gallery’s own funds, £1 million of the total has already been raised. The Gallery has £300,000 to raise by spring 2017.
The Gallery has no other significant portrait of the Duke in its Collection, an omission of one of the most iconic and popular figures in British history. The Gallery has been seeking to secure such a portrait since it opened in 1856. This work is one of only two world-class portraits of Wellington ever likely to come up for sale. The leading artist of his age Sir Thomas Lawrence made eight portraits of Wellington and was the Duke’s definitive image maker.
Started in 1829, the year Wellington was appointed Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports and in which he fought a duel with Lord Winchilsea over the issue of Catholic emancipation, the unfinished portrait shows him in civilian dress with only his black collar and white stock visible. It was commissioned at the height of Wellington’s political career when he was Prime Minister. At the time he was closely involved in the legislation around catholic emancipation and deeply opposed to the reform of the House of Commons. Earlier in the decade he had been involved in the delicate negotiations between the Prince Regent and the Prince’s estranged wife, Queen Caroline. He also represented British interests at the Congress of Verona in 1822, one of a series of conferences on European affairs after the Napoleonic Wars.
The large oil-on-canvas portrait was commissioned a year after Wellington had become Tory Prime Minister by Sarah, Countess of Jersey, a leading political hostess and supporter of the Tories in the 1820s. Initially dedicating her social gatherings to the cause of the Whig party, in the late 1820s Lady Jersey switched her allegiance to the Tories, with Wellington becoming one of her favourites. She believed herself to be one of his confidantes, but he mistrusted her ability to keep a secret: earlier in life her loquacity had earned her the nickname ‘Silence’.
At Lawrence’s death in 1830 the portrait remained unfinished. But unlike many other clients, Lady Jersey refused to have it finished by a studio assistant. On hearing that the Duke of Wellington had fallen from power in 1830, Lady Jersey burst into tears in public. She reportedly ‘moved heaven and earth’ against the Reform Act 1832 which Wellington had also opposed.
Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, says: “We have been searching for a portrait that can do justice to this iconic British hero since 1856. The lack of a suitable depiction of the Duke of Wellington has long been identified as the biggest gap in our collection. If we can raise the funds this remarkable painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence will be on permanent display and free for over two million visitors to enjoy each year.”
Dr Stephen Deuchar, Art Fund Director, says: “The National Portrait Gallery will make a fine home for this intensely compelling portrait of Wellington. We are pleased to have made a major grant towards its purchase, and hope the public will support the appeal to raise the remaining funds. This is a very important national acquisition.”
Dr Lucy Peltz, Senior Curator, 18th-Century Portraits and Head of Collections Displays (Tudor to Regency), National Portrait Gallery, London, says: “This is a compelling portrait of one of the most famous figures in early nineteenth-century Britain. Lawrence was a superlative portrait painter with the flair and talent to capture surface glamour and deeper currents. This unfinished portrait is shot with psychological insight.”
Dan Snow, historian, broadcaster and co-author of The Battle of Waterloo Experience, says: “The ‘Iron Duke’ is one of the towering figures of British history. He never lost a battle, reshaped Europe, and dominated Britain until his death. His career and legacy are intimately involved with the development of the United Kingdom. Now, more than 200 years after his most famous victory at the Battle of Waterloo it’s time we helped the National Portrait Gallery win the day.”
The painting was lent to the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Wellington: Triumphs, Politics and Passions staged in 2015 to mark the bicentenary year of the Battle of Waterloo. Prior to its loan to the Gallery from a private collection for a short period of display just before the exhibition opened, the portrait, which is in excellent condition, had not been on public view for any significant period since it was painted.
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