LONDON.- Every month during
Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Bicentenary celebration year a spectacular masterpiece will hang on the end wall of the Gallery’s enfilade.
February sees the arrival of El buf髇 Don Sebasti醤 de Morra by Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Vel醶quez (1599 -1660). Noel Desenfans and Sir Francis Bourgeois, the two founders of Dulwich Picture Gallery, believed that they owned a portrait of King Phillip IV of Spain by Vel醶quez, painted at the time of the Battle of Fraga in 1644. In fact that canvas is a seventeenth-century copy of the original by Vel醶quez, now in the Frick Collection in New York. El buf髇 Don Sebasti醤 was painted by the Spanish artist around the same time as the Fraga portrait of the King and is one of the painter’s most arresting and memorable works.
The dwarf Don Sebasti醤 de Morra was the buffoon and servant to Philip IV’s brother, the Cardinal-Infante Don Fernando, and had followed him to Flanders. He returned to Spain in 1643 and entered the service of the King’s eldest son and heir, the teenage Prince Baltasar Carlos. When the Prince died of smallpox at the young age of sixteen in 1646, he left in his will a small silver sword and other objects to Don Sebasti醤, demonstrating that he must have held the dwarf in very high esteem.
The portrait of Don Sebasti醤 is an essay in painterly virtuosity. Each piece of fabric, plush velvets and lace, is beautifully rendered by gleaming brushstrokes. The soles of the dwarf’s shoes are almost abstract paintings in themselves, as the light hits one and the other slowly withdraws in shadow. Don Sebasti醤’s face is an astounding exercise in psychology – filled with sadness and pity, but also dignified, gracious and noble. Vel醶quez portrays with this apparently insignificant dwarf an entire era of Spanish culture and history, the glorious reign of Philip IV.
Miguel Zugaza, Director of the Museo Nacional del Prado, said: “I wish Dulwich Picture Gallery a very happy Bicentenary celebration, and am pleased that the Prado can mark the event with this month’s loan of Vel醶quez’s Don Sebasti醤 de Morra.”
The masterpiece will be on display from 1 - 27 February 2011.
