John Brealey’s Visit

Rafael Alonso Alonso, Restorer, 1978-2016

John Brealey, who was the Head of Restoration at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, came to the Prado because he was invited to clean the painting, Las Meninas. Which annoyed us, although my colleagues were more prudent than I was, because my reaction was too drastic. The fact is that we found out just three days beforehand that he was coming to clean the picture. I thought it was wrong, because we were working at the Museum and we had restored some very important works, paintings that had suffered from much more serious problems than Las Meninas, because only the varnish needed to be removed. So I was angry about it. I didn’t see any of the restoration process for Las Meninas because I refused to go up. A year later, Brealey came to head a restoration workshop and Manuela Mena, who was the Head of the Restoration Workshop at the time, introduced me to him because he wanted to talk to me expressly. He came with a translator, because he didn’t speak any Spanish. We chatted for a while and, afterwards, Manuela said to me, “when you’ve finished talking to him, bring him up to the Restoration Workshop and introduce him to your colleagues”. Typical Manuela.