Aureliano de Beruete

Transcription

Thank you all for coming today. I'm Javier Barón, Chief Curator of Nineteenth-century Painting. I am going to explain to you why in my opinion and that of many others this is Sorolla's finest portrait: the portrait he painted of his friend Aureliano de Beruete, who was, like him, a painter, as is evident in the work's remarkable quality. It is also a portrait that dominates the gallery in which paintings by Joaquín Sorolla and Beruete himself can be seen side by side. Beruete was firstly a lawyer, a doctor of Law, and only later decided to become a painter, with a remarkable bent for landscape: he is an example of a specialist painter. As you can see, Sorolla pays tribute to that dedication to landscape in this portrait of 1902 as what we have is a painting within a painting. It's a landscape of Toledo, as Toledo was the city that most attracted Beruete. Again influenced by Beruete, Sorolla painted there alongside him in 1906 then again in 1912 after Beruete's death. The painting sits on a portable easel of the type Beruete used for his painting campaigns: he went to Toledo to paint every October between 1875 and 1911, the year before his death. He spent a month there painting, using this portable easel. During these periods he could easily produce two dozen works. At the time when Sorolla painted him in 1902, Beruete was experiencing the need to evolve towards a more luminous type of painting, giving rise to his finest works, those of his last period. This change took place around 1903 when he moved towards Impressionism, with a broader type of brushstroke and purer colour. As a result, along with Regoyos, Beruete is the only example of pure Impressionism in Spanish painting. A later one in relation to his French models, but he certainly produced a pure type of Impressionism because he was an artist who worked from life, who used pure colour and also a divisionist brushstroke, which are the three features that allow us to decide if a work is Impressionist or not. Beruete is at a transitional moment here, he would also go on to use coloured shadows, but at this moment he was influenced by Sorolla himself, who in the field of painting and in terms of painterly practice was a reference point for Beruete. Sorolla was a born painter, a painter who was the key reference point in strictly pictorial terms, just as Beruete was in an intellectual, cultural and social sense. Furthermore, by 1902 Sorolla had already painted the portrait of his wife María Teresa de Moret, who was Beruete's cousin - he painted it the year before - and the composition is very similar. The body is shown three-quarter length, the face seen almost straight on and with a vivid, almost casual sense of the sitter's presence. Look how he is wrapped in his overcoat, holding his soft hat in his hands as if he had just arrived and taken it off, while he still has his gloves on as if he had immediately sat down. This is not a formally posed portrait as we might think portraits were up to this date; rather it is a portrait in which Sorolla aimed to convey that sense of instantaneousness which really makes it much more natural. The pose is thus very natural but at the same time the sitter's physical appearance is perfectly conveyed. It is the appearance of an intelligent, lively, alert person with the attentive gaze of a painter and with the maturity possessed by the fifty-seven year old Beruete, here at the height of his career as well as a fully developed individual, and also aware that the person painting him is a great master. In fact, this portrait of 1902 would enjoy remarkable success and from this point onwards Sorolla included it in his most important exhibitions. When he took it to London to the exhibition of his work at the Grafton Galleries in 1908 it was seen by Huntington, who was the founder of The Hispanic Society of America and who was at that date considering commissioning a major gallery of portraits of leading Spanish personalities of the time. When he saw Sorolla's magnificent portrait of Beruete he wanted to buy it. Sorolla had given it to Beruete just as he had given his wife her portrait, so at that point he wrote Beruete a letter saying that if he didn't mind he would sell the portrait to Huntington as he would do another one of him. He offered to paint another to replace this one. The surviving reply from Beruete to Sorolla is exemplary as it reveals to us Beruete's perfectly developed sense of the work's significance in its time and of the esteem in which he held it In that letter of 1908 Beruete says to Sorolla: “I am very sorry not to be able to accommodate you on this occasion because in truth the portrait that you have painted of me is the by now unalterable record of a historic moment, of a time that will not return. Aside from the quality of the one you would do now, which would probably be even better, as you know I have in fact set aside this painting for the Museo de Arte Moderno.” This was indeed the case and on his death the portrait passed to the museum of modern art and then, when that museum became part of the Prado, it entered the Prado. What we have with this work is a homage to the great tradition of Spanish painting. A homage to Velázquez, as is the portrait of his wife, in terms of the remarkable quality of the gradations of greys and blacks. The more intense grey of the gloves and of the hat band with its beautiful highlights in bluer tones, the blacker shades of the hat and the overcoat; the buttons, which all gleam in a different way as the light falls on them differently due to the different planes in which they are located. Take a look also at the waistcoat and the jacket. Together everything creates a marvellous symphony of grey and black tones in a great homage to Velázquez. Look how the light appears to make the head stand out from the background in an almost sculptural way, a background which led Juan Ramón Jiménez to refer to this as a “great Velázquez-like portrait”. Jiménez referred to “deceptive backgrounds” in the sense that with Velázquez's and El Greco's it is impossible to know where the spatial recession ends and this is also the case here. There is a lighter part that allows us to see where the portable easel is located in the middle-ground but we lose ourselves in the rest, as we do in Velázquez's paintings, in his portraits, where we lose that sharp edge that separates the horizontal from the vertical and everything becomes an all-enveloping atmosphere in which there is no clear spatial definition and we have that sense of mystery which Sorolla saw in Velázquez, whom he studied in the Prado and whom he understood extremely well. It has been a pleasure for me to discuss this painting, given that we are not only paying tribute in this gallery and with this talk to the remarkable quality of the work and the remarkable quality of the sitter but also to Beruete's conviction regarding what someone can do to support a museum and be an effective and outstanding example to follow.