Voces del Prado

The Need for New Acquisitions

Fernando Checa Cremades, Museum Director, 1996-2001

There is a problem, one that is less important today, but a problem that still exists, namely the idea that is held by cultivated circles (although they don’t seem that cultivated to me) that the Museo del Prado now has its collection, so there’s no real need to spend any more money. It is evident that the Museo del Prado, since it incorporated a good part of the Royal Collection throughout the nineteenth century, has been a superior collection, one that really has no equal. It’s worthy of all the superlatives you might wish to heap upon it. However, that collection belonging to the Museo del Prado, based on the Royal Collection, also incorporated the paintings of another national museum during the nineteenth century, a museum that had been founded in the 1830’s, the Museo de la Trinidad. That’s how almost all of the El Greco works at the Museum today were acquired. That is to say, if El Greco is one of the cornerstones of the collection at the Museo del Prado, together with the Spanish paintings of the seventeenth century, which also came from the Museo de la Trinidad, then it isn’t such a complete collection. The third source of paintings at the Museum consists of New Acquisitions, which is the only inventory that is open, because this is where the new purchases are incorporated. This is where most of the paintings reside. All of Goya’s work, for example. When the Museum opened, there were just three Goya paintings from the Royal Collection, and now we have more than one hundred and fifty of his works.