Description

This catalogue of Spanish painting in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC is the second volume in the Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. This collection is one of the finest in the western hemisphere and includes important groups of work by El Greco, Goya, Valaquez, Murillo, Valdes Leal and Juan van der Hamen y Leon. The catalogue contains the most comprehensive entries on all works in the National Gallery of Art; with a biographical outline of the artists; a description of, and often fresh observations on the physical condition of each painting; critical discussions of such matters as attribution, chronology, identification of subject matter or sitter, and a summary of previous scholarship. Other material that makes this catalogue the most comprehensive study of these works is the important discovery by Dr David A. Brown, a curator at the Gallery, who identified a painting from the Italian period of Fernando Yanez da la Almedina. This discovery revises the understanding of this Spanish follower of Leonardo da Vinci and his relationship with his collaborator, Gernado Llanos. Also the painting Bullfight often attributed to Goya is here assigned to Eugenio Lucas Vilzamil (1858-1918).