The Theology of Painting - The Cult of Velazquez and British Art at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.

Those who wandered round the Manet/Velazquez exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2003 were struck, in the final room, by a remarkable transition. A series of paintings, including works by Whistler, Sargent, Chase and the members of the Ash Can School showed us that the flame of seventeenth-century Spanish Caravaggesque painting which rested in Paris with the second generation realists - Manet and his contemporaries - had then suddenly leapt the Atlantic and fired the studios of Washington Square. Works by Henri, Glackens and others were there to prove once again the centrality of American painters in appropriating a continuing European tradition. British and Irish artists who looked to the Spanish tradition were nowhere in sight. Even the continuities in Spanish painting, in Zuloaga and Sorolla, at the turn of the twentieth century were neglected. This essay concentrates upon the degree to which hispagnolisme , supported by scholarship, supplied a kind of orthodoxy for British painters at the turn of the twentieth century. It examines the degree to which the accumulated practice of three generations was absorbed into a coherent set of attitudes and opinions about the way the world was observed. Behind issues of handling, there were notable style attributes which led to Lavery's portrait of Cunninghame Graham, the laird of Gartmore, being described by Bernard Shaw as a ‘Spanish hidalgo’. The painter was colluding with a chosen identity and particular from of self-presentation. What were the myths around Spanish painting and Velazquez in particular? What did this mean in the age of Empire and how did it impact upon the problematic social clas ification of aristocracy? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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