Portrait of Doña Isabel de Porcel
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| Doña Isabel de Porcel |
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| Francisco de Goya , 1804-1805 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 82 × 54.6 cm |
| National Gallery , London |
The portrait of Doña Isabel de Porcel is an oil painting by the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya . It was created between 1804 and 1805 and depicts Isabel Lobo Velasco de Porcel , the wife of the Spanish politician Antonio de Porcel . The work has been owned by the National Gallery in London since 1896 and is part of the permanent public exhibition of paintings.
background
Isabel Lobo Velasco de Porcel was born in 1780 and came from the small Andalusian town of Ronda . Her father, Joaquín Lobo y Velasco, was a civil servant in the local city council and her mother, María Mercedes Velasco y Mendieta, was from Seville and moved to Madrid with her six children after the death of her husband . There Doña Isabel married the 46-year-old, widowed politician Antonio de Porcel in 1802, to whom she bore a total of four children between 1802 and 1807. She died in 1842, ten years after her husband's death in 1832.
Antonio de Porcel was born in 1755 and came from the Andalusian province of Granada . He was a member of the influential Castile Council as well as the Council of India and was also minister responsible for all Spanish possessions in North and South America and held other high political offices throughout his life. He was friends with the enlightening statesmen Manuel de Godoy and Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos , who brought him into contact with Goya, who lived near the couple's estate in Madrid and had previously made portraits of the two politicians.
Emergence
As an expression of gratitude for the appreciation and hospitality shown by the Porcels, Goya subsequently painted both a portrait of Doña Isabel (1804–1805) and her husband (1806). The latter showed him in hunting clothes, holding a rifle and a hunting dog at his side. It was destroyed by fire in 1956 at the storage location at the Jockey Club in Buenos Aires . However, a black and white photograph of the painting was preserved.
Shortly after completing the portrait of Doña Isabel, Goya had it exhibited together with the portrait of the Marquesa de Villafranca in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in 1805 , which can be seen as an expression of his own satisfaction with the two works, since he has it thereby exposed to public appraisal and critical assessment by other artists and academics. In the exhibition documents it was listed as a portrait of the wife of Don Antonio de Porcel , which recently made it possible to identify Doña Isabel as Don Antonio's wife.
Image composition
The portrait, which reaches to the waist, shows a young woman who is wrapped in a traditional Andalusian robe. Over a white blouse , she wears a pink satin dress , over which a black lace mantilla is thrown, which frames her face and partially covers her upper body. The dark clothing and the only imperceptibly lighter background contrast with the woman's light, almost pale skin.
Her expressive face is framed by dark blonde, half-length and loosely parted hair, the slightly curled tips of which fall sideways onto her face, exposing her ears. The lively expression is enhanced by her large, black and slightly rolled eyes and her well-formed red lips.
Her body is turned slightly to the left, while her head is turned to the right, which in turn contributes to the balance of the representation. Your hands rest on your lap or are supported on your hips and round off the lower part of the half-figure. The slight shortening of perspective also gives the picture spatial depth and makes it appear realistic even without a designed background and decorative accessories.
interpretation
Goya depicted Doña Isabel, like many of the other women he portrayed, in the garb of a maja , a woman of the lower classes who, despite her simple origins, consciously dressed fashionably and elegantly, a fashion that women of the upper classes wear often tried to imitate at the time.
The portrayal of Doña Isabel is often viewed as that of an attractive, lively young woman who is in the prime of her beauty and who presents herself in a confident and proud manner. The sensual quality of the portrait, the “plump body”, which is further accentuated by the full red lips or the large round eyes, is particularly emphasized.
Investigations
In 1980 the painting was subjected to intensive cleaning on behalf of the National Gallery in order to restore the original color intensity and brightness . In the course of the treatment, extensive analyzes were carried out, some of which yielded astonishing results.
Identification of the depicted
The name of the sitter is wrongly often with Isabel Cobos de Porcel given as this is the modern label that during the doubling of the screen was mounted on the rear reinforcing canvas late 19th century.
When the rear canvas was removed in 1980, however, it became apparent that an older handwritten inscription was still hidden on the original canvas: La Exma. Sra. Dna. Lobo de Porcel (written out: La Excelentísima Señora Doña Lobo de Porcel ; German Her Excellency Señora Doña Lobo de Porcel ) and then Goya's signature Pintado por Goya (German painted by Goya ). The family name Cobos of the modern inscription could be revealed as a wrong transfer of the actually correct Lobo .
X-ray examination
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An X-ray examination of the painting revealed that it was painted over another (almost) completed portrait of a man in uniform, which, however, cannot be reliably assigned to Goya. The old canvas was not primed again before it was used again , which is why today the man's right eye, among other things, can easily shine through Doña Isabel's chin.
The sitter is placed a little lower on the canvas - Doña Isabel's chin runs across his eyes - and looks in the direction of the viewer with his head and body turned slightly to the left. He wears a uniform that cannot be found in any other of Goya's paintings. The uniform skirt is decorated with a multitude of narrow stripes that form a regular, rectangular pattern. Also recognizable are a wide lapel and the ribbon of an order on the right side of the chest.
The fact that the man's easily recognizable face shows typical features of Goya's portrayal style, for example in comparison to his portrait of the army doctor Don José Queraltó , makes Goya's authorship probable, but not entirely certain. The portrayed person and his strikingly designed uniform are also not found in other pictures from Goya's work. It seems more likely than that the artist himself discarded the old portrait, therefore, that the sitter may have died before 1805 or that Goya was unable to remove the picture for some other reason.
With the help of the x-rays, subsequent changes to the portrait of Doña Isabel could also be identified. On the left side of the picture, the skirt was originally painted higher, which was corrected later, and the elbow, as on the right side of the picture, should be cut from the edge of the canvas, but this was given up in favor of a more balanced and centralized representation of the sitter.
It remains unclear on the one hand why Goya did not turn the old canvas in order to hide the man's head in the dark areas of the new portrait, and on the other hand why he used an old canvas again for a commissioned work. It only seems certain that the re-use of the canvas must have influenced the design of the new portrait, as features such as the head placed high and turned to one side and the image-filling dominance of the dark robe are unusual for Goya's work.
Others
On March 24, 1958, on Stamp Day 1958, the Spanish Post issued a special edition with paintings by Goya, which also contained a postage stamp with the motif Doña Isabel de Porcel . This is only a section that was mirrored.
literature
- Allan Braham: A Hidden Portrait of Goya . In: The Burlington Magazine . Vol. 123, No. 942 , September 1981, pp. 540-543 , JSTOR : 880476 .
- Janis A. Tomlinson: Goya: Images of Women . Exhibition catalog National Gallery of Art . Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2002, ISBN 0-300-09493-0 , pp. 185-187 .
- José Valverde: Cuatro Retratos Goyescos de la Sociedad Madrileña . In: CSIC (ed.): Anales del Instituto de Estudios Madrileños . tape 30 . Madrid 1991, p. 33–36 ( Online (PDF; 2.0 MB)).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Matías Fernández García: Parroquias madrileñas de San Martín y San Pedro el Real . Caparrós Editores, Madrid 2004, ISBN 84-87943-99-3 , p. 297 ( online ).
- ^ A b Valverde: Cuatro Retratos Goyescos. 1991, pp. 33-36.
- ↑ a b c d e Tomlinson: Goya: Images of Women. 2002, pp. 185-187.
- ↑ a b c d Braham: A Hidden Portrait of Goya. 1981, p. 541.
- ↑ Dagmar Feghelm: I, Goya . Prestel, 2004, ISBN 3-7913-3071-3 , pp. 74 .
- ^ Wilhelm Messerer: Francisco Goya, form and content of his art . Luca, Lingen 1983, ISBN 3-923641-01-X , p. 128 .
- ^ W. Stanley Taft, Jr .; James W. Mayer: The Science of Paintings . Springer, New York 2000, ISBN 0-387-98722-3 , pp. 78 f . ( Online , see also the book cover).
- ↑ a b Braham: A Hidden Portrait of Goya. 1981, p. 542.