TO MADRID for my birthday, to meet Gaby on her way back from London and to honour the greatest of Extremadura’s citizens – or so we thought. In fact we found ourselves honouring two of them, the 17th century painter Francisco de Zurbarán and on almost the same plane, despite his death at the age of 29, Francisco’s Extremaduran-born son Juan, above all a still-life painter.
Juan was treated almost as an appendage of his father’s when I started in on Spanish art history but here he shines out as a most substantial and delightful painter in his own right. It is a change in perception that has come about in the past 20 or 30 years.
The occasion for honouring the father was an exhibition at the Thysssen, rather boringly entitled ‘Zurbarán, una nueva mirada’, ‘Zurbarán, a new look’ but here, in an offering agreeably less than massive was a fine selection of his work, an overview composed of paintings from the great monastic series, one-off paintings for individual commissions, a fair number of his individual female saints, clothes-horses, ‘dressed as if for heaven’ as one critic has observed – almost all of these, like the vast bulk of his work, and most Spanish art at this time, religious in theme. His still-lifes, a little stiff and austere, perhaps, but magisterial, and always paintings to thrill, were also represented. And then there were the works of Juan, arguably greater still-lifes even than those of the father.
Austere is a word we like to use for Zurbaran Senior in Extremadura, austere and sober, too, partaking of the seriousness of the dry air, the rocks, everything people hold in their minds as symbolic of this region, often somewhat fantastically.
Francisco de Zurbarán was born in a small town here, perhaps you might even call it a village, Fuente de Cantos in the province of Badajoz, in 1598. He studied in Seville, without ever taking his painter’s passing out exams, and returned to a more monumental town in Extremadura, called Llerena, seat of the Inquisition in these parts, stuffed with monasteries.
Recent research shows that his origins were humbler than thought earlier. His father came most probably from the Basque Country and married locally, a muleteer’s daughter from the mountains by Monesterio. Their son Francisco in turn married a shoemaker’s daughter, one María Páez, nine years older than Francisco, but better off than he was. She had three children with him. Juan was the second, but his mother, María, died soon after the birth of the third. Within two years, the infant Juan had a step-mother. Francisco by now had a studio and assistants to look after, not to mention his three children, and his choice fell upon another older woman, Beatriz de Morales, and like Juan’s mother an Extremaduran. She was considerably better off, with properties in the main square in Llerena. Handy for the studio, handy for the family.
Zurbarán began to pick up commissions in Seville. When his son Juan was nine years old, despite the protests of his future colleagues at his failure to complete his apprenticeship, he moved himself and family to Seville and from then on, for many years, never lacked for great commissions. Monastic life in Seville was growing by leaps and bounds; all orders wished to be represented there. The opportunities for artists to decorate new buildings were almost unlimited. Later, after the Council of Trent had finished its deliberations and demanded in effect new and more popular subjects – in response to the rise of Luther and Protestantism – there was a wave of monastic redecoration, another chance at the same market. It was necessary, wrote a Spnish mystic of the period ‘to find God in things’.
What people most admire in Zurbaran, and Gaby and I are no exceptions, is the tremendous ‘thisness’ of his paintings, to use a word of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s. There they are, his saints, his martyrs, his Holy Families, Christ Crucified, Christ at the moment of expiration, and they are all most tremendously present, tremendously definite, solid and existent, along with the objects that surround them, sometimes with passages of architecture or landscape. But this presentness, this real existence, also offers an intensity which people find impossible to read except in terms of spiritual intensity. Most down to earth of painters, most spiritually exalted. Also, a wonderfully delicate colourist.
His figures grow out of dark backgrounds, specially in his youth. He is a total master of textiles, the whites of Carthusians, the dark habit of the Franciscans, the gorgeous brocades he attributes to the doctors of the church – textiles and their textures. To me in the end he is almost more a master of texture than anything else.
The same is true of Juan, who soon went to work with him in his studio, one among many assistants toiling over the monastic series, but also soon painting his own individual works. The first shown here in the exhibition is a pewter plate loaded with grapes, white grapes to left, well-lit, quite beautiful in their detailing and fresh colour, tumbling off the platter, reflecting on its rim and to right, vanishing off into darkness, black grapes. Leaves and grapes project above, a little capriciously, into the deep black surrounding the while composition. It is a clear masterpiece, done by a 19 year old in 1639. ‘…from this early date, the pupil has surpassed the master when it comes to painting nature’, says the catalogue. Agreed.
Some of his paintings have a Flemish look, a Dutch look one should say by now, one with flowers in a glass vase most exquisitely delineated. His chinaware is also exquisite. But it is fruit which is always the key to Juan’s work. This is often contained, or comes tumbling out of, a large willow basket at centre of many of his pieces, stuffed with apples, pears, quinces, plums occasionally, two varieties of figs, very often, and almost always pomegranates splitting gorgeously apart to reveal their scarlet seeds. We soon realise Juan is moving away from Dutch influence and into the arms of the Neapolitan, into a boisterous Baroque where his father remained a master of the most austere – it’s inevitable that word – of restrained Spanish Baroque.
There are only three paintings by Juan which are signed and dated and they show this same movement through style. Art historians have been hard at it examining works once said to be by his father and other contemporaries and the canon is now pretty well established – so there he is, Extremaduran hero with a Sevillian overlay, one of the most original and dizzyingly talented of that Golden Age period of Spanish still-life paintings. Like his father, he is a supreme master of texture, in his case fruit, rather than textiles.
Juan married well, had two children and died, aged 29, in 1649, one of the terrible plague years of mid-century Seville. A third of the population perished that same year.
His step-mother Beatriz had died ten years earlier. Five years before Juan’s death, Francisco , his father, well off now at the age of 46, married for a third time, a widow named Leonor de Tordera, 18 years younger than he, a Sevillian. Plus ça change.
Zurbaran, una nueva mirada, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, closing alas Sept 13. But the catalogue in English or Spanish is a delight.