Àngels Comella and Joan Yeguas In the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (Barcelona) and the Museo Nacional del Prado (Madrid), two virtually identical portraits are conserved. This leads us to formulate different questions. Could both paintings have been done by the same artist? If they were, what part did the painter’s workshop play in it?…
Read more
Joan Yeguas In 1949, along with the main group of paintings from his collection, the portrait of a gentleman – with inventory number 64995 – entered the museum via the bequest of Francesc Cambó i Batlle (Verges, 1876 –Buenos Aires, 1947). On the back of the canvas there was an inscription in French that has…
Read more
Yolanda Ruiz Until the mid nineteenth century, the possibility of having a portrait was a privilege within reach of very few people. The bibliography for the history of photography points to the direct link between calling cards and the boom in the fashion of the photographic portrait that took place in the second half of…
Read more
Peter Paulus Rubens, Lady Alethea Talbot, Countess of Arundel The sitter was the wife of Thomas Howard, the 2nd earl of Arundel, an important figure at the English court, a noted patron of the arts and literature and the owner of one of the finest collections of painting, sculpture and singular books in Europe. The…
Read more
Alícia Cornet Most of us associate post-mortem photography with a custom belonging to other cultures, other countries. We see it as a distant practice, which was performed beyond our frontiers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Photographers here took this kind of portrait photograph too. It is true that the photography of the deceased…
Read more
Alícia Cornet The museum conserves a collection of portraits of artists taken in the most important photographic studios in Barcelona in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. In this article we shall talk about four of these studios: the Napoleón, and those of Antoni Esplugas, Joan Martí Centellas and Pau Audouard. Photographic innovations Three…
Read more
Paris, circa 1889 A painter, who we cannot identify, poses seated before the camera lens of a photographer, whose identity we do not know either. The artist has a proud air about him, satisfied with the work he has just done and whose results he is showing in public. The roomy bright surroundings in which…
Read more
One of the habitual tasks of the conservator-restorer of the museum is to act as a courier. It is a job that doesn’t only involve accompanying the work to be loaned for a temporary exhibition but also writing the reports about the state of conservation, of the interventions of restoration (if necessary), supervision of packing…
Read more
Personally, the exhibition Josep Tapiró. Painter of Tangiers, has been a considerable professional challenge. The major dispersion of the most important works has made the task of finding the works difficult, even though in the end we have managed to bring most of the ones we had counted on at the start. Furthermore, the historical-artistic…
Read more
