Next February, the Sotheby's auction house in New York intends to continue adding million-dollar records with the sale of a large portrait of Queen Isabel de Borbón signed by Diego Velázquez. The estimated price is 35 million dollars (almost 32 million euros) during what is known as the week of the Old Masters in which on other occasions a painting by Botticelli, for example, reached 40 million euros. This canvas brings together a series of characteristics that make it a rarity in the art market and, therefore, justifies this stratospheric figure for ordinary mortals. It is difficult for a painting by the Spaniard to sell (it is the most important work by Velázquez to hit the market in half a century, after his portrait of Juan de Pareja). It is perhaps more difficult that it is a painting of royalty. Furthermore, this piece left Spain under unknown circumstances during the War of Independence and since the 19th century it has made a journey that has taken it from Madrid to Paris, in the south of Great Britain, passing through Naples to the New York headquarters of Sotheby's.
One of the first clues about the portrait of Queen Isabel dates back to one of the rooms where it was hanging in the Casón del Buen Retiro, one of the buildings that was part of the palace complex, in which Felipe IV resided, built on the initiative of the Count Duke of Olivares. It is not known exactly when she arrived at this place. Next to this great painting, explains Javier Portús, head of Conservation of Spanish Painting until 1800 at the Prado Museum, there was “a very important quantity of works by number and quality.” Some were created for this space, others arrived by flood. “This painting, due to its typology, predates when the palace was finished being built, so it would come from another place,” says the expert about the work that dates back to the beginning of 1630. What seems clear, as Portús explains, is that it is a royal commission because at that time the main and most important client of the Velázquez's workshop was the monarchy.
It hung in the Casón del Buen Retiro until the beginning of the War of Independence (1808-1814). The moment in which the painting of Queen Elizabeth left this palace on its way to France is unknown. There are several theories, says Portús, but none confirmed because there are no documents that prove it, as is the case with many of the works from this palace complex that now hang in the Prado Museum. In the middle of the war between the French and the Spanish, “there are many paintings that change location and also owners,” the expert concedes.
The looting occurred in several ways. On the one hand, José Bonaparte selected 50 works for the Bonaparte Museum that were returned to Spain as a consequence of the Treaty of Vienna. Then there is what is known as “King Joseph's luggage.” “On their departure from Spain, those paintings were intercepted by the Duke of Wellington,” Portús recalls, “and when he wanted to return them, Ferdinand VII decided that the British general should keep them.” Fernán Núñez, Spanish representative in England, was in charge of responding on behalf of the king: “Attached I transmit to you the official response that I have received from the Court, and from which I deduce that His Majesty, moved by your delicacy, does not wish to deprive you of what has come into your possession through channels as just as they are honorable.” More than 80 of these works have been on display for years at the Wellington Museum at Apsley House in London. But the portrait of Queen Elizabeth was not there.
There is another possibility, that the generals and other soldiers in Napoleon's army did their own dealings. Or, perhaps, behind the release of this Velázquez painting is the hand of one of those dealers who, as Portús remembers, wandered around Spain in search of bargains. “A significant number of works came out of that hodgepodge,” says the Prado expert and gives as an example The Arnolfini marriageby Jan van Eyck, a painting that was in the Royal Palace in 1814 and is now exhibited in the National Gallery in London.
Second stop: Paris
The next time the painting could be seen was in the Spanish Gallery of King Louis Philippe I in the Louvre Museum in Paris. On January 7, 1838, when this space was inaugurated, Parisians could see more than 400 paintings by Spanish artists, the collection that the monarch had been building. Among the works was Velázquez's portrait of Queen Isabel, which is being auctioned in February. Only a decade later, in 1848, the Second Republic was established in France and the pieces traveled to Great Britain. It will be there, in 1853, when “one of the most important auctions of the century” takes place, in the words of Portús. It was in this sale when the painting passed into private hands for the first time. British banker and collector Henry Huth purchased lot 249, which was in the hands of his family until 1950, when his heirs sold it.
In 1978 it changed hands again. It is not clear what happened between the year 50, when Huth's family sold it, until it reached its current owners, the Wildensteins, the dynasty of Jewish dealers who began their activities in art in the 19th century. This clan of dealers known for their problems with the law—they were involved in a case of fraud and tax evasion for 15 years, in addition to being identified as collaborators of a Nazi collector who sold works of art stolen from Jews—has had in its collection three paintings by Velázquez. The one that Sotheby's auctions in February, the portrait of Ferdinando Brandani, also known as The Pope's Barberand acquired by the Spanish State for 23 million euros in 2003, and Portrait of a girl (La contadina), sold by the Caylus gallery to an American collector.
At this time, the Wildensteins lent the work to a monographic exhibition on Velázquez held at the Capodimonte Museum in Naples in 2005 and in which Benito de Navarrete participated in the preparation of the catalog cards. The professor of Art History at the Complutense University shows this newspaper the page of the publication in which his colleague Alfonso Pérez Sánchez explains that the portrait of Isabel de Borbón is “the first autograph version”, that is, it is the original work by the Spanish artist, not one of the later known copies. The painter portrayed the Spanish monarch in full body, aged around twenty and wearing an elegant black dress. The artist's reviews, he explains, at Sotheby's, were due to his “simultaneous desire” to update the image of the monarchs and “demonstrate a new method of painting” influenced by his personal encounter with another of the great masters of the time. , Peter Paul Rubens, writes Christopher Apostle, international head of Old Master Paintings at Sotheby's.
Stop the auction
Next February, neither the Prado Museum nor the Ministry of Culture will try to claim it. Sources from both institutions confirm to this newspaper that the regulations prohibiting the looting of art as spoils of war were developed in the 20th century. And this case is previous. EL PAÍS has consulted with three lawyers about the possibilities the Spanish State would have of stopping the auction or starting litigation to try to get the painting returned to Spain. In all three cases, the answer is the same: “It is very complicated.” No UNESCO treaty applies and the laws that, for example, heirs of Jewish families plundered by the Nazis are resorting to could not be used in this case.
“Not even the case of Goya's painting of the Marchioness of Santa Cruz can be used as a precedent,” recalls Rafael Mateu, from the Ramón y Cajal law firm, about the work that left Spain illegally in the early 1980s. “The State managed to stop the auction in London due to the fraudulent way in which it was sold abroad.” No one knows how Queen Isabel got out of the Casón del Buen Retiro, but since then it has been exhibited up to three times and sold at public auctions. As the three lawyers remember, there has been enough time to claim a work that has not been hidden.
All the culture that goes with you awaits you here.
Subscribe
Babelia
The literary news analyzed by the best critics in our weekly newsletter
RECEIVE IT
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#left #Spain #strange #circumstances #19th #century #reappears #Sotheby39s #story #39velázquez39 #break #auctions