Voces del Prado

I Don’t Want to Be a Restorer When I Visit the Museum

Rocío Dávila Álvarez, Restorer, 1974-2015

I don’t want to be a restorer when I come to see paintings. I want to enjoy myself, not suffer. Because when I see pictures that I’ve restored, I think, “I should have done this”. No, if I come to see paintings, it’s for enjoyment. Now I devote myself to other things. I’m a grandmother and I look after my grandchildren. I do things with my grandchildren that I did with my own children. In fact, I have a son who is a painter, you could say, unfortunately …. but I’m delighted. I used to bring them to see paintings. We would come, for example, to see Goya’s The 3rd of May 1808 in Madrid, and they loved that. We’d come to see it, we’d stay for a while looking at it; I’d explain it to them and they’d look at their faces, and then we’d go. Since we like it so much, at home we have a number of books on painting; they spend all day drawing what they see in the books, and when they know the picture, then we come and see it at the Museum. Because you mustn’t tire kids out; you can’t bring them to see all the Velázquez paintings, all the Goyas and all the Rubens, because they’ll get bored and won’t want to come again. So I’ve always brought them to see one picture in particular, not all of them. So at home, since we loved this work so much, it was easy to imbue them with a passion for painting. I think the trick is to just bring them to see one thing.