El Greco paintings at the Prado
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4 of the Most Famous Spanish Artists and Their Artworks

This November, the Prado Museum in Madrid celebrates its bicentenary, and to mark the occasion we showcase some of the most famous work by Spanish artists on permanent display

Since its foundation in 1819, The Prado Museum in Madrid has gathered some of the most pivotal works by Spanish artists in art history under its roof. Much of its collection centers on the acquisitions and commissions made by Spain’s monarchs during the 16th and 17th centuries, and the Bourbons who took over in the 18th century. Philip II, for example, admired 15th-century Flemish artists such as Memling and Bosch, while Philip IV favored Rubens, Velázquez, and Van Dyck. The changing tastes of its rulers have provided Spain with the world’s largest collection of works by these artists and more.

1. El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos) (1541–1614) 

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The Prado has the most important collection of El Greco works in the world (banner image), including The Nobleman with his Hand on His Chest (1580) above. Images: Alamy

El Greco—so named because he was born in Crete (then under Venetian rule and known as the Kingdom of Candia)—was a truly transformational painter who greatly influenced the artists who defined the Cubism and Expressionism movements. Manet, Cézanne, and Picasso, as well as Chagall, Modigliani, Delaunay, and Giacometti have either directly copied or assimilated El Greco’s work to produce new pieces out of old. He is, says Javier Barón Thaidigsmann, one of the museum’s leading experts, “a critical reference point” for much modern art.

The Nobleman with His Hand on His Chest, from 1580, is widely considered to be the most significant work by the artist held by the Prado, not least because it is one of the first paintings he completed after moving from Rome to Toledo in 1577. It shows a distinguished nobleman dressed in black, standing against a dark background. The eye is drawn to his face, his right hand—which rests on his breast—and the gilded hilt of his sword. The painting was a source of inspiration for Picasso’s The Musketeer (1967).

2. Juan Sánchez Cotán (1561–1627) 

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The intense naturalism of Sánchez Cotán’s bodegóns (Spanish still lifes) has guaranteed his place in art history, despite the fact that he abandoned his career as a commercial painter to enter a monastery in 1603. Image: Alamy

Known as the father of Spanish still-life painting, Sánchez Cotán, who was born in Orgaz, near Toledo, elevated the genre and gave it the respect and recognition it had previously lacked in his home country. His inventive style of illuminating simple fruits and vegetables against a black background made his work highly collectible among Toledo’s intellectuals. Though he continued to paint after entering monastic life, his work thereafter was mostly devotional.

The Prado has three of his still lifes, the most notable of which is Still Life with Game, Vegetables, and Fruit (1602), which is thought to be the first surviving Spanish bodegón (still life) and therefore one of the most famous artworks in the museum’s collection.

3. Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) 

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Velázquez's Las Meninas (1656), considered to be one of the most important paintings in art history. Image: Getty Images

Velázquez proved to have as prodigious a talent for politics as for art—Philip IV not only appointed him his only portrait painter, but also Chamberlain of the Royal Palace, a key position he kept until his death. Many of the works he painted for the royal collection are now in the Prado, including Philip III on Horseback (1635), Philip IV (1623), and the inscrutable Las Meninas (1656), a masterpiece of the Spanish Golden Age and one of the most important paintings in art history.

Las Meninas shows the Infanta Margarita Teresa, the five-year-old daughter of Philip IV, flanked by her ladies-in-waiting. At first glance it is a picture of family life at court—King Philip and Queen Mariana are reflected in the mirror observing the scene—but look closer and you will find a complex image presenting conflicting focal points, and interpretations. Velázquez expert Dawson Carr suggests it is a statement that “art and life are an illusion,” while the late art historian E.H. Gombrich stated: “Velásquez has arrested a real moment of time long before the invention of the camera.”

4. Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) 

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The Prado holds the largest collection of Goya works, including The Naked Maja, The Clothed Maja, and all 14 of his Black Paintings. Pictured is Two Old Men Eating (1820–23). Image: Alamy

Regardless of where he sits in the history of modern art—probably on the bridge between the old masters and the new—Goya is, without doubt, the most significant Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Born in Fuendetodos, in Aragon, Spain, he moved with his family to Saragossa and then, as an adult, to Madrid, where he spent most of his life. In 1824, he went into exile in Bordeaux, and remained there until his death four years later.

His rich and varied oeuvre includes etchings, the Rococo-style tapestry cartoons he painted for Charles III and Charles IV of Spain (which introduced him to the monarchy and paved the way for his appointment as royal court painter in 1786), portraits, and a series of 82 prints, called The Disasters of War.

Examples of all of these can be seen at the Prado, which holds the largest collection of Goya works, including The Naked Maja (1795–1800), The Clothed Maja (1800–07), and all 14 of his Black Paintings, the gruesome images he composed directly onto the walls of his house. Considered among the most disturbing artworks ever made, these feverish, intense murals, showing demons and monstrous carnage, introduce viewers to a vision of hell that is difficult to shake off.

Saturn Devouring His Son by Goya in the Prado, Madrid
Saturn Devouring His Son, one of the disturbing Black Paintings series by Goya on display at the Prado. Image: Alamy

While the Prado’s collection stops in 1881, the continuing history of Spanish art is told at Madrid’s other leading museum, the Reina Sofía, which has outstanding works by Picasso—including Guernica (1937)—Dalí, Miró, and Antoni Tàpies, whose Personage (1950), Cat and Pyramids (1948–49), and Blue with Four Red Stripes (1966) are among several pieces on permanent display. Barcelona-born Tàpies, who died in 2012, worked in mixed-media, including found objects, marble dust, and resin. He was one of the leading European artists of his generation, cofounding the avant-garde group Dau al Set in 1948, which had strong links to Surrealism and Dadaism.