The Famine Painting

The writer Umberto Eco imagined an ideal museum dedicated to a single work of art: a space where stories would accumulate around it, culminating, as the ultimate exercise, in the public's contemplation and understanding. This vision resonates powerfully in the Museo del Prado's new exhibition format "A work, a story", a concept ideally suited to The Year of Hunger in Madrid by José Aparicio (1818). In the words of Miguel Falomir, director of the Museo del Prado, the aim of the exhibition is “to encourage the viewer to look at a work which, aside from its aesthetic merits, helps us to reflect on aspects of art history that often go unnoticed."

This canvas, one of the most acclaimed and controversial in the collection of the Museo del Prado since it first opened in 1819, is filled with events and figures that demonstrate how a single work can reconstruct the complexity of a past world without losing its contemporary relevance. The return to the Museum, albeit on a temporary basis, of what was known in its day as the “hunger painting” offers the opportunity to contemplate with today’s eyes what was once one of the most celebrated works in Ferdinand VII’s Spain; no other painting generated more discussion in the decades following the museum's inauguration in 1819.

The Year of Hunger in Madrid returns to the Prado charged with the full weight of its significations: the memory of a catastrophe, the political ambition with which it was conceived, the misunderstandings surrounding its reception, and the erosion of its prestige. In addition, on this occasion its critical reassessment has been accompanied by an ambitious restoration programme which has improved the work’s stability and legibility.

This oversized canvas (315 x 437 cm) was created in the context of a recent and tragic memory: the Madrid famine of 1811-12, which those who first saw the painting in the museum in 1819 had experienced at first hand. In Aparicio’s scene a group of starving figures heroically rejects bread offered by French soldiers. This action is presented as an allegory of "Spanish resoluteness" and a narrative of unconditional loyalty to the absolutism reestablished by Ferdinand VII after his return from exile in France. The inscription "NADA SIN FERNANDO” [Nothing without Fernando] carved into one of the pillars in the scene reinforces this propagandistic message, transforming a recent calamity into an instrument of legitimacy for the monarch.

In 1819 the Royal Museum of Painting and Sculpture (as the Museo del Prado was initially named) opened to the public with 311 works on display. A notable aspect is the prominent presence of José Aparicio, a history painter, courtier and cleric, and his work The Year of Hunger in Madrid (1818) in comparison to Goya, who was limited in the initial selection of works to his role as court portraitist with Charles IV on Horseback (1799-1800). The press functioned to transmit the enormous popularity gained by what was then known as the “hunger painting”, which transcended the art world and acquired visibility in political and social spheres. Through the use of an academic language rooted in Neoclassicism, Aparicio’s work offered the best visual metaphor to attack or condemn “the other”—an invader, a king, a government—who was blamed for a lack of responsibility and the negative consequences of its effects.

This history painting also served as a political artifact: the reconstruction of its original location at the Museo del Prado, undertaken in collaboration with the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, has focused on this “pilot episode” in the Prado’s history, about which very little is known, revealing the ideological toll imposed by the monarch on that space, which was royal property at the time.

The enormous popularity which the painting came to enjoy ultimately acquired greater ambiguity with the emergence of other sensibilities that mistrusted an image that was too eloquent, too famous and too effective.