Voces del Prado

An incident in the Casón del Buen Retiro

María Teresa González Escolar, General Services Assistant, 1990-2013

There were very large paintings on the side walls and in the corridors and they were very exposed as they almost reached down to the floor and there weren’t any rope barriers. This was worrying as people could bump into them without meaning to. One day as I was looking after my room and a colleague’s who was on her break, I was right in the middle and a lady looking at a painting started to move backwards. I saw her take two steps and I thought she was going to stop but she continued moving back until she bumped into the painting. Obviously, she didn’t do it on purpose, she wasn’t looking and didn’t realise she was going to run into it. I thought she’d made a dent at the worst, but she really made a mess of the painting as the canvas was very worn and she was carrying a bag with a book or something in it... That really upset me. I don’t know if we had walkie-talkies then; the thing to do in these cases was immediately ring the head warder’s office. You couldn’t leave the gallery so you had to ring a colleague or tell them to stay in your room while you went and called. So the head warder arrived and they had to ring the curator.
You always had to try to make sure that people didn’t touch the paintings. When they got too close you had to say, “Excuse me, please don’t get so close”. This caused problems as people would start saying, “Er, so how close can I get? Up to here or here?” So you’d reply, “Up to here. The rope shows you where and from that point it’s too close.” You had to avoid them getting too close before they actually start touching, as the most terrible thing for a warder is people touching a painting.