Fortuny (1838-1874)

Continuing the Museo del Prado’s strategy, launched some years ago, of reassessing the great masters of 19^th-century Spanish painting, the Museum is now presenting the major exhibition Fortuny (1838-1874), sponsored by Fundación AXA and with the special collaboration of the Museo Fortuny in Venice and the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.

Devoted to one of the 19^th-century Spanish artists who has enjoyed the most sustained reputation and greatest international fame, and a notable figure within Spanish art of all periods, the exhibition is on display in Rooms A and B of the Jerónimos Building from 21 November 2017 to 18 March 2018.

While Mariano Fortuny has long been celebrated in the specialist literature and through the numerous exhibitions and different initiatives of varying quality and importance that have been devoted to him in recent decades, his stature as an artist and his profound roots in the most authentic tradition of the great Spanish School justify a focus on the part of the Prado of the same level of ambition and importance as those which the Museum has dedicated to the most important artists represented in its collection.

Curated by Javier Barón, Chief Curator of 19^th-century Painting, the exhibition is structured as a chronological survey of Fortuny’s contributions as a painter, watercolourist, draughtsman and printmaker. In addition, visitors can appreciate works from the artist’s remarkable collection of antiques that he had in his atelier. These precious objects, some of them now housed in the world’s leading archaeology museums, reveal Fortuny’s interest in careful observation and explain his extremely refined ability to capture texture, colour and light in his own creations as well as the remarkable virtuosity of his work, which rapidly extended his fame among Europe and America’s leading collectors.

The first section of the exhibition is devoted to Fortuny’s formative years in Rome and includes works that reveal his precocious maturity, evident in his pencil, chalk and charcoal life studies, his watercolours (Il contino) and his oils (Odalisque). Although he went to North Africa to paint episodes from the Spanish-Moroccan war (The Battle of Wad-Ras), what most interested him were the different local peoples and their customs (Arab Fantasia), an inspiration that reappeared throughout the rest of his career and made his contribution to European orientalism a particularly unique one.

Between 1863 and 1868 Fortuny focused on portraiture (Mirope Savati, never previously exhibited in Europe), on large-scale decorative painting (Queen María Cristina and her Daughter, Queen Isabella, reviewing the Artillery Batteries defending Madrid, now shown in its original position), and on copies of the great masters in the Prado (El Greco, Ribera, Velázquez and Goya), the latter helping to giving his art greater depth and complexity. He achieved new success in the 1860s with his oils and watercolours on 18^th-century subjects (The Print Lover and The Spanish Wedding) and Arab ones (Arab Chief, A Moroccan, The Tapestry Seller, A Street in Tangiers, and Opium Smoker). Fortuny particularly developed the latter interest during the time he spent in Granada between 1870 and 1872 and that city also inspired genre scenes in composite architectural frames (Noblemen’s Pastimes, Luncheon at the Alhambra and Old City Hall in Granada). Most innovative of all, however, were the artist’s first-hand depictions of objects, figures (Nude old Man in the Sun), gardens and landscapes in the form of oils, watercolours, ink and pencil. Works such as The Carrera del Darro, Granada, never previously seen outside the British Museum, reveal his ability to capture atmosphere through a new and fresh type of colouring.

Having returned to Rome, in 1873 Fortuny focused on Arab themes using a more synthetic technique (Arab leaning against a Tapestry and Arab Fantasia outside the Gate of Tangiers), looked at the reality of daily life (Carnival on the Corso, Rome), and completed various genre paintings he had started some years before, such as The Choice of a Model. A period spent that year in Portici near Naples offered him a direct contact with nature which brought a new awareness of local colour and coloured shadows to his paintings of nude children on the beach (including a group of four, two never previously exhibited), and to his landscapes such as Street in Granatello, Portici and Neapolitan Landscape, recently acquired by the Prado. Fortuny’s watercolours are seen at their best in two examples of Landscape at Portici from this period (one exhibited for the first time), and in his portraits of Cecilia de Madrazo and Emma Zaragoza.

The participation of major institutions around the world has ensured the outstanding quality of this exhibition. The special collaboration with the Museo Fortuny in Venice and the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya has been particularly important due to the large number of loans from those museums.

The son and grandson of craftsmen, orphaned at a very young age, Fortuny developed exceptional technical skills during his initial training. Following his early studies in painting at the municipal school in Reus, in 1853 he embarked on an academic training at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona. From 1858 a period in Rome as a grant student of the Provincial Council of Barcelona introduced him to the great works of the Renaissance and Baroque. He also attended the Accademia Gigi in Rome where he produced life studies of nudes that reveal his skilled ability to depict bodies combined with a notable expressivity arising from his mastery of both pen and pencil. Fortuny’s abilities as a watercolourist are already evident in Il contino, a work in which the depiction of a young man in 18^th-century dress in a monumental garden (the Villa Borghese in Rome) anticipates his subsequent genre compositions. Odalisque reflects the artist’s mastery of the nude of a particularly sensual type, depicted with a degree of freedom and realism greater than that seen in his works produced in Barcelona.

The Provincial Council of Barcelona sent Fortuny to Morocco to compile graphic information for subsequent paintings on the most notable achievements in the Spanish-Moroccan War, in which Catalan volunteer troops were fighting. In Morocco from February 1860, Fortuny followed the campaign, witnessing and subsequently painting The Battle of Wad-Ras. At the same time he was also notably attracted by local customs and peoples. He returned in 1862 and made numerous sketches in preparation for The Battle of Tétouan, again for the Provincial Council, a large-format work that remained unfinished.

The discovery of North Africa’s bare, sweeping spaces, its intense light and dazzling colour produced a radical change in Fortuny’s painting. This is evident in both his works painted from life and those subsequently executed in the studio from sketches, his memory and his imagination. In the latter type he offered original depictions of aspects of Arab life that had appealed to him for their picturesque or enigmatic nature.

After spending some months in Barcelona, Fortuny returned to Rome where he continued to work on Arab themes and also painted oils and watercolours of the local people from the countryside around the city. These works make use of a realist style inspired by the work of some of the artists of the Neapolitan School which he had seen at the First Italian National Exhibition in Florence in 1861 and in the exhibitions he visited in 1863. Fortuny occasionally painted portraits, notable for their interest in subtle nuances of colour. He was also commissioned to paint one of the ceilings in the Parisian residence of Queen María Cristina de Borbón, for which he devised an original solution. That work is displayed here for the first time in its original position as a ceiling painting, allowing for its complete visual comprehension. During one of Fortuny’s periods in Madrid, where in 1867 he married Federico de Madrazo’s daughter Cecilia de Madrazo, he painted one of his most interesting works of this period, Fantasy on Faust. This is an outstanding example of the vivid imagination and vibrant brushstroke which the artist employed to execute his studies in just a few hours, their fresh, skilful technique also evident in other oil paintings in this section.

Fortuny was exceptionally skilled in printmaking techniques. Following his initial use of lithography in 1857, in the 1860s he produced a remarkable series of etchings that can be considered one of his finest achievements. They depict Arab subjects, genre scenes and others of classical inspiration, all characterised by an expressive intensity that made full use of this technique’s different resources, which he had studied in the work of Ribera, Rembrandt and Goya. Following his first trip to North Africa, Fortuny realised that etching was particularly suited to conveying its mysterious atmosphere. This group of prints offers the finest and most true to life vision of orientalism to be found in European art. The Anchorite, one of the artist’s masterpieces, conveys the sense of both death and the desolation of nature. The complexity of this work is fully evident in the exhibition with the presence of the original copper plate, two proof states and an impression of the final state printed by Fortuny’s son.

Through his relationship with the art dealer Adolphe Goupil, Fortuny achieved a level of international success that reached its peak with The Spanish Wedding, a genre scene set in the time of Goya. In addition to that work he produced a large series of genre paintings of which the most elaborate, The Choice of Model (1868-74), was painted for his principal collector, William H. Stewart. In scenes of this type Fortuny evoked a world of beauty set in architecturally ornate interiors in which painting was evoked through homages to other artists. In parallel to the painstaking detail of these works, the artist continued to paint watercolours that enjoyed increasing success, making use of a range of technical resources with enormous freedom and refined colour and as a result completely transforming the prevailing approach to this medium. Finally, Fortuny’s dedicated practice of drawing sketches from life in his notebooks provided him with extremely useful material for use in his subsequent paintings and watercolours.

Following international success, a period of more than two years in Granada gave Fortuny the peace and tranquillity he desired, far from Paris and in a place of great beauty that inspired an exceptional group of paintings. First-hand observation gave rise to oil studies of nudes, quiet corners of the city, landscapes and flowers, in all of which he captured colour and light in a new way. He also produced more complex works in which he freely combined elements from different sources to create new spaces. These scenes, set in the medieval Islamic period, the Renaissance and the 18^th century, are surprising for their juxtaposition of real, recognisable elements and others invented by the artist. In works of this type the quality of the buildings chosen as the settings, embellished with decorative objects studied in preliminary oil sketches and drawings, evokes a marvellous, self-absorbed universe in which Fortuny engaged in his creative activities during what he considered the happiest period of his life. 

Having started in a relatively modest manner, Fortuny’s collecting activities developed in the 1860s, particularly after he began to meet antique dealers, connoisseurs and collectors. During his time in Andalusia his innate taste and criteria led him to acquire Hispano-Moresque works of enormous quality. Fortuny was attracted to a wide range of objects, particularly arms, ceramics, textiles, ivories, furniture and glass. A truly outstanding area is Islamic art, the core of his collection, while he also possessed excellent examples of the Italian and Spanish decorative arts as well as Japanese textiles, screens and prints. Fortuny’s great technical skills allowed him to work as a restorer and he even made several pieces that look antique, such as the sword on display in this gallery. The display of all these objects alongside his own creations in his studio in Rome resulted in a beautiful setting in which the textures, colours and reflections of the objects directly inspired his own creative activities.

In the last years of his life Fortuny returned to the Arab themes that he had depicted years before, now in a more synthetic manner and with greater dynamism and expressivity, achieved through more intense colour and freer brushstroke. He also turned his attention to subjects from daily life, as in Carnival on the Corso, Rome of 1873, and scenes of family life in the form of depictions of his wife and children in the months they spent in Portici near Naples. During that intensely active period Fortuny’s practice of working outdoors by the sea enabled him to fully grasp local colour and its relationship with the fall of light, leading him to depict coloured shadows. He also explored other directions, such as the aesthetic of the Far East, in oils and watercolours of an intimate nature, including The Artist’s Children in the Japanese Room. Fortuny’s sudden, premature death, which was received with consternation in Rome, gave rise to a cult of the artist and his work became widely known and appreciated over the following years.