The Prado Multiplied: Photography as Shared Memory

The collection of historical photographs is the latest addition to the holdings of the Museo del Prado. Its importance has increased noticeably in recent years, as evidenced by the growing number of works it contains and the public’s deepening interest in them. 

Like engraving and lithography, photography allows multiple copies to be made of the same work. But its ability to accurately represent reality is what has made it the primary means of publicising the collections, as well as a powerful repository of memory for the institution and its visitors.

Photographs reproducing works of art constitute the largest group in the collection, and their analysis has informed this exhibition narrative, which pays special attention to the material quality of the photographs themselves and the purposes they served in the second half of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth. The selected images, which feature a variety of photographic formats, techniques and supports, were taken by Spanish and foreign photography firms like Laurent, Moreno, Anderson and Hanfstaengl.

The show opens with one of the first photographs ever exhibited at the museum, in 1899, takes a visual tour of different rooms in the Villanueva Building, and then turns to photographic or photomechanical reproductions of works currently in the museum’s collection. It also acknowledges the Prados’s special ties to the photographers Jean Laurent (1816–1886) and José Lacoste (1872–?) and how they helped to spread the image of the museum outside its walls. 

The museum's artworks began to be systematically photographed in the 1860s, although the first requests to make photographic reproductions of certain pieces were received some years earlier. Due to the low sensitivity of the procedures used at the time, initially the works were often taken outside to be photographed as the lighting conditions were better. Once the shot had been taken, the negative was processed to obtain a positive image that photographers could sell in different formats, mostly of which had standard sizes, like the carte de visite. 

The exhibition also shows the architectural spaces that held the collection’s most iconic works, like the Central Gallery and the basilical hall, and thematic areas such as the Murillo Room and the sculpture gallery. As a group, these photographs are quite fascinating from a historical and museographic perspective, but closer inspection reveals other intriguing details: the cluttered arrangement of paintings on the walls, period furniture and heating, and fleeting glimpses of human figures at a time when the Prado’s interiors were usually photographed empty. 

Although the museum’s holdings include undated images of the building and its collections, it is possible to establish a fairly accurate date for some items. This is true, for instance, of several carbon prints—a fade-resistant pigmentation process developed by Braun et Cie—that were obviously acquired to be displayed as part of the exhibition marking the third centenary of Velázquez’s birth held at the Prado. 

Photographic reproductions at the Prado mostly featured paintings and, to a lesser extent, sculptures, although some drawings and examples of the decorative arts were also present in the main photography collections, showcasing the rich variety of the museum’s holdings. Photographs of masterpieces like Velázquez’s Surrender of Breda were sold by different companies, which offered images of the entire painting or close-ups of its most significant details. The former were mainly produced with collectors and museum visitors in mind, while the latter tended to appeal more to experts and connoisseurs. For instance, the large, partial image of this painting came from the personal papers of the Hispanist Enriqueta Harris (1910–2006), who used it in her research. 

However, some of the photographs shown here were taken before the pictured works entered the Prado, when they still belonged to the Museo de la Trinidad or were entered in a national fine arts exhibition, according to the printed labels or handwritten inscriptions that accompany several of them.

The early twentieth century was the heyday of the postcard, a by-product of photography that combined the power of the image and the communicative function of the written word. The invention of collotype and other printing techniques made photography less expensive, boosting the popularity of these illustrated cards and taking the public circulation of the Prado's collections to a whole new level.