Voces del Prado

Joaquín de la Puente

Ana Gutiérrez Márquez, Senior Technician of Museums (Conservation of 19th Century Painting), 1975-2018

I would like to particularly single out Joaquín de la Puente because of the relationship I’ve had with him. I think there’s hardly anyone else in the Museum these days who could have known him or if there is, perhaps they won’t have the same opinion as me. And there’s another person, Eva Perales, the restorer who started working with him and who was there when we were in the Casón. It was a marvellous learning experience for both of us and we’ve often talked about it. For her as a restorer, as he understood painting and knew perfectly what had to be done to conserve a painting; and for me as a theorist his contribution was always marvellous.
He was a painter by profession. He’d studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Fernando and had taught in an official school connected with the Fine Arts, although I don’t remember which one. He had an exceptional painter’s eye. He didn’t have the academic training that the directors of the Prado had but he had the practical training of a painter and so he had a special eye. He could explain a painting to you from a technical viewpoint: the brushstroke, the colours, the combination of colours, the structure, etc. Maybe he didn’t have that more wide-ranging training about art in general. In all his publications he focused more on technical aspects, although he was also very poetic, very Baroque when he spoke and wrote. So maybe in that sense he was an outsider. But from a technical viewpoint he was marvellous. He himself said that you had to have an eye to know how to decipher, to attribute a painting to a particular painter, something that a theoretical study often doesn’t achieve. We researched a lot using documentation but for him, documentation practically didn’t exist. He had a vision and it was always an accurate vision. For me it was an outstanding practical lesson. He taught me to see a painting, something you can’t learn from books. This is why I particularly venerate don Joaquín de la Puente.