The Painter Antonio Muñoz Degrain (1840-1924)

The exhibition

The 19th-century collection, comprising 2,800 works, is one of the Prado’s largest painting collections. Inevitably, only a small selection of these works have been displayed in the museum’s galleries since 2009. For that reason, Room 60 has been set aside for interesting works drawn largely from the museum’s own storage spaces or hitherto on loan to other museums; the aim has been to revitalise key works, by restoring them and placing them on show in small monographic exhibitions. These have been devoted to particular painters, for example, Aureliano de Beruete, Rogelio de Egusquiza, Genaro Pérez Villaamil, Federico de Madrazo, Antonio María Esquivel, Francisco Pradilla, Joaquín Sorolla, Eduardo Rosales and José de Madrazo; to specific techniques, such as watercolours in the days of Fortuny and his followers; or to certain themes, including religious painting in the mid-19th century, children’s portraits in the Romantic period, or donations such as the Hans Rudolf Gerstenmaier bequest. Other exhibitions have focused on the work of the sculptor Miguel Blay, and on 19th-century Japanese prints. All the works involved belonged to the Museum’s permanent collection.

The Museum holds twenty paintings by the Valencian artist Antonio Muñoz Degrain, spanning the whole of his career; this large, representative collection of his oeuvre also includes his  highest-quality works. Muñoz Degrain – who trained at the Valencia School of Fine Arts – explored a wide range of genres in the course of his long career, but focused particularly on landscape painting. His earliest landscapes, such as View of the Pyrenees in Navarre (1862), though still Romantic in tone, reveal an interest in Realism. The best-known is his Landscape at El Pardo, as the Mist clears (1866); the recent restoration of this canvas has highlighted his use of clean colours, his skilful structuring of planes and his astonishing ability to convey the effects of light and colour, which had hitherto never been addressed in Spain. The success of this landscape is underlined by the fact that it was included in a painting – also on show here – by his friend Francisco Domingo. Memories of Granada (1881) illustrates Muñoz Degrain’s free approach to the rendering of landscape  where the imagined dimension merges paradoxically with a highly realistic effect.

Muñoz Degrain also addressed historical and literary themes in his work. The Lovers of Teruel (Room 75) – his best known work, produced while he was training in Rome – was awarded a first-class medal in 1884. The search for a mysterious, stimulating space through exotic colouring and loose execution is also apparent in a related painting, Before the Wedding. Other themes included nocturnes and scenes from the Old and New Testaments, for whose settings he travelled to the Near East; a good example is his Jesus by the Sea of Galilee, a painting more Symbolist in tone.

The works on show here, five of which were restored for the exhibition, testify to the breadth of Muñoz Degrain’s artistic interests, though always tackled from the same distinctive perspective, shaped by his singular painterly personality. This is also apparent in the subject chosen for his lecture when admitted to the Academia de San Fernando (1899): “Sincerity in Art”. His search for originality made him a point of reference for his students, when in 1895 succeeded Carlos de Haes as Professor of Landscape at the Special School of Sculpture, Painting and Engraving in Madrid.