Exhibitions
2025-04-01 • 2025-09-25
From El Greco to Zuloaga
Masterpieces of Spanish Art at the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum
After its extraordinarily warm reception at the Seville Fine Arts Museum—welcoming 115,808 visitors from 2 December 2024 until 16 March of this year—the exhibition From El Greco to Zuloaga is back at the Bilbao museum to show thirty paintings and two sculptures representing the quality of the collection of Spanish school works in its collection.
The works chosen by José Luis Merino Gorospe—Ancient Art conservator at the museum and curator of the show—survey four centuries of Spanish art and highlight two of the most significant genres from the period, portraits and religious art, along with important examples of still lifes and landscape paintings.
The exhibition includes works by such notable painters as El Greco, José de Ribera, Francisco de Zurbarán, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Luis Paret, Francisco de Goya and Ignacio Zuloaga, as well as two beautiful small wooden religious carvings: Calvary (c.1576–1580) by Juan de Anchieta and Our Lady of Sorrow (c.1754–1756) by Juan Pascual de Mena.
Prominent works in the exhibition include The Annunciation (1597–1600) by El Greco; Saint Elizabeth of Thuringia and Saint Catherine of Alexandria (c.1650–1660) by Zurbarán; Saint Peter in Tears (c.1650–1655) by Murillo; View of Bermeo (1783) by Paret; Portrait of Martín Zapater (1797) by Goya; and Portrait of Rosita Gutiérrez (1915) by Zuloaga.
As a new feature, the painting The Bullring of Seville (c.1870) by Mariano Fortuny is being shown for the first time at the museum after it was acquired last year thanks to the bequest of Begoña María Azkue. This is an important example of painting from life which represents the artist’s most genuine, personal side.
The exhibition begins with the section ‘From the Table to the Horizon. Still Life and Landscape’, with two of the most iconic still-life painters in the history of the genre: Juan de Arellano, with an extraordinarily fine example of a floral still life, a subject he fully mastered, and Luis Meléndez, whose balanced composition shows his vast talent for depicting things, along with the fertile legacy of Zurbarán’s still lifes of crockery and fruit. Despite the almost one century separating them, both are painted to perfection and show this timeless painting genre’s sensorial possibilities and taste for detail.
They are displayed with four landscapes dating from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries which show different variations on depictions of the land. While he was still young, Ignacio de Iriarte travelled to Seville, where he was probably trained in Herrera the Elder’s workshop. The exhibition displays a landscape with figures in which the dusky lighting and arrangement into different planes imbue the composition with mystery and depth. The architectural capriccio, with a catalogue of imaginary buildings in perspective, provides an opulent backdrop for the biblical story painted by Francisco Gutiérrez Cabello. In turn, the views painted by Luis Paret make the scenic view of the village of Bermeo an exceptional forerunner to his subsequent celebrated series on the ports of the Cantabrian Sea. The dashing figures on the lower part of this oil painting on copper are echoed in the genre scene entitled Lady Reading a Letter by José Camarón. Finally, Mariano Fortuny’s plein-air painting depicts the bullring of Seville in a composition divided equally between the sky, the arena and the bleachers, featuring the loose brushstrokes Fortuny used to capture the lights and shadows.
The central part of the exhibition, entitled ‘Beyond the Surface. Portraits’, brings together wonderful examples of different approaches to another great painting genre, individual portraits, either court portraits, wonderfully represented by Alonso Sánchez Coello, Juan Pantoja de la Cruz and Claudio Coello, or ‘divine portraits’, a special adaptation of the genre found in Francisco de Zurbarán’s saints. Dating from the late eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth century, the psychological insight and talent for capturing settings in the paintings of Francisco de Goya and Vicente López, respectively, explain why both artists are considered among the top representatives of portrait painting. The selection ends with two female figures with a landscape by Ignacio Zuloaga, who nods to the Spanish painting tradition in the teachings of El Greco and Goya, and Anselmo Guinea, who assimilates the impressionistic light he learned in Paris.
To complete the exhibition, the section on ‘Lights and Shadows of Devotion. Sacred Art’ displays a series of devout images. The aforementioned masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—El Greco, Juan de Anchieta, José de Ribera, Francisco de Zurbarán and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo—are joined by prominent works by Francisco de Herrera the Elder, Pedro Orrente, Vicente Castelló, Juan Ribalta and José Antolínez.
The sequence extends into the eighteenth century with Luis Paret, this time with a refined sense of colour in The Virgin Mary with Child and Saint James the Greater, and Juan Pascual de Mena, who depicts Mary in a beautiful image of private devotion in which the figure’s contained movement and the folds concentrate her pain only partly alleviated by the elegant colouring.
Saint Elizabeth of Thuringia, c.1650–1660
Oil on canvas, 125 x 100.5 cm
Bilbao Fine Arts Museum
Contributed by the Bizkaia Provincial Council in 1919
Fortuny stood out for his exceptional handling of light and colour and an attention to detail that enabled him to capture the moment depicted in his compositions with poetic precision. Despite the fact that he died young, at the age of 36, he was able to create his own style, known as fortunismo, which would influence many artists.
After his early training at the Fine Arts School of Barcelona (1853–1857), where he soon stood out for his talent, in 1858 he learned about the Renaissance and Baroque in Rome thanks to a grant. From then on, that city was his usual residence and the place where he earned prestige as an artist. In 1860 and 1862, the Provincial Council of Barcelona commissioned him to travel to Morocco with the goal of documenting the Spanish-Moroccan conflict. The North African light and the archetypes and customs that he discovered on these two journeys left a profound mark on his style and became the key to his works’ success. During that period, he took an interest in the paintings of Velázquez and Goya, which he saw in the Museo del Prado, at that time directed by his future father-in-law, Federico de Madrazo.
After his stint in Paris in 1866—where the Bilbao painter Eduardo Zamacois connected him with his future dealer, Adolphe Goupil, and the US collector William H. Stewart—his fame grew thanks to genre paintings meant for an international clientele with a taste for historicist or orientalist scenes. Throughout his career, Fortuny combined this easily sellable type of work with a freer and more personal style, mostly painted from life and in plein air.
This beautiful view of the Maestranza bullring in Seville is a good example. In the absence of a description of the bullfighting narrative, the arena is foregrounded, articulated by the light and shadows described with loose, vibrant brushstrokes. This addition to the museum thanks to the bequest of Begoña María Azkue can be considered a milestone for the collection, as Fortuny was one of the best nineteenth-century European painters.
After his sudden death in Rome in November 1874, this painting, which was part of the collection in his studio, was sold for 3,250 francs in the auction held at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris on 27 April 1875. Its whereabouts was unknown from that time until it reappeared in an exhibition on the artist held in Barcelona in 1989.
The Bullring of Seville, c.1870
Oil on canvas. 74 x 95 cm
Bilbao Fine Arts Museum
Acquired in 2024 thanks to the bequest of Begoña María Azkue
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