My name’s Felícitas Martínez and I’ve been with the Prado for nearly 50 years. I started at university in the 1970s, in the 1970-71 academic year. At the end of that summer my sister had a very serious accident. So, as I wasn’t going to leave Madrid and wasn’t going anywhere, a friend who was one of my teachers at senior school said, “Look, your art history teacher at university – Matías Díaz Padrón – needs someone to help him type the texts of the catalogue of 17th-century Flemish painting. He also needs someone to help him with his doctoral thesis.”
So I started working with Matías Padrón that summer. The Museum paid me to type the texts of the Flemish painting catalogue. That was the summer of 1971 and in the summer of 1973, well in fact in early October, they decided to offer me a contract. So I’ve been here uninterruptedly since 1971. And as we now celebrate 200 years of the Museum I can say that I’ve been here for a quarter of its life.
She joined the Museum as typist and secretary to the directors, then going on to the Documentation and Archives Area in 1973, where she is responsible for the systematic filing of reports from the Restoration workshop, among other duties.
Interview recorded on May 03, 2018