Exhibited for the first time at the Museo del Prado are six portraits of the family of Philip V from the collection of the Biblioteca Nacional de España. Commissioned from the painter Miguel Jacinto Meléndez for the Royal Public Library in 1727, they are now shown alongside six further works by the artist from the Museum’s own collection.The six portraits on display here from the Biblioteca Nacional constitute the most important group of works by this artist and reveal his artistic maturity as a portraitist. Together with these portraits from the Biblioteca Nacional, the Museo del Prado is displaying the portraits of Philip V and Isabella Farnese from its own collection. They conform to a prototype of official royal portrait formulated by Meléndez and widely disseminated. Two fine portrait drawings of two of the royal children are displayed alongside them.

Miguel Jacinto Meléndez

Uncle of the still-life painter Luis Meléndez, Miguel Jacinto Meléndez (Oviedo, 1679 – Madrid, 1734) was one of the finest painters in Madrid in the first third of the eighteenth century. In artistic terms this was a transitional period between the Baroque of the Golden Age - which lasted until well into the eighteenth century - and the creation of the Fine Arts Academy, but one that also reveals signs of the new aesthetic trends that led on to the Rococo.