Wreath of flowers with St. Philip Neri

This work belongs to a series of six paintings of which only five have been preserved (P1056, P1057, P5095, P5099 and P5250). Cruzada Villaamil (1865:173–174) recorded the three that he included in his catalogue (P1056, P5250 and P5099) among the anonymous paintings of the Valencian school, although with an uncertain attribution to Bartolomé Pérez. In Madrazo´s 1878 catalogue of the Museo del Prado, the first in which two of them were included (P1056 and P1057, numbers 2174E and 2174F in the catalogue), they were already listed as works by Bartolomé Pérez. When both paintings were included in the Museum´s catalogue, Madrazo wrote that they came ‘from the Convent of San Diego of Alcalá de Henares, where there were five others, according to the inventories of the seizing Commission of the Royal Academy of San Fernando, which collected them in 1836’. This provenance has continued to be maintained in successive catalogues until the 1996 catalogue. However, those belonging to this series (P1056 and P1057) were confused with other flower wreaths attributed to Pérez, which are also claimed to have been part of the series, but without sufficient evidence (P1052, P1053, P1054 and P1055). In fact, it seems that Madrazo was mistaken, perhaps because the inventory he consulted did not contain the measurements of the paintings. The series from the convent of San Diego de Alcalá were also recorded in the general inventory of the Holy Trinity paintings, stored and chosen by the Academy Commission. This series, which must have disappeared in its entirety, consisted of seven paintings and was landscape and much larger (112 x 196 cm): ‘De Alcalá / Convent of San Diego / 111. 7 [second-class paintings]’, 4 x 7 feet.

Álvarez Lopera, José, El museo de la Trinidad: historia, obras y documentos (1838-1872), Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2009, p.107