Visual arts review: The Discovery of Spain: Goya to Picasso

Published on Monday 20 July 2009 19:00

THE DISCOVERY OF SPAIN: GOYA TO PICASSO **** NATIONAL GALLERIES COMPLEX, EDINBURGH

THE Duke of Wellington famously beat Napoleon at Waterloo. His real victory was not in a single battle, however. It was in the long years of the Peninsular War that eventually led to the invasion of France and Napoleon's abdication in 1814.

For the people of Spain it was the War of Independence and Wellington's success depended on Spanish support and his alliance with the guerrillas, Spanish irregulars who gave us that word. He was a hero in Spain. That is why Goya painted his portrait some time during the late summer of 1812, when for a few months Wellington held Madrid before retreating westwards to regroup for the final push against the French. The portrait is in the National Gallery in London and is included in the exhibition, The Discovery of Spain.

It is bust-length. Wellington stands straight-backed, looking haughtily out at us. His military coat of scarlet and blue almost hidden by ribbons, medals and sashes, he is every inch the Iron Duke. Less well-known, but now hanging beside the painting, is the drawing that Goya did in preparation. Its format and exquisite finish suggest Goya knew he would only get one chance. He could finish the painting at his leisure. This drawing would be the only witness of their meeting and what an extraordinary witness it is. Wellington's reputation is as a stiff, unbending soldier. But here, in place of the ramrod back, he is slightly stooped, as though beneath the burden of his responsibility. His eyes are luminous, anxious, almost haunted. Their wary intelligence moderates the stubborn set of his chin. Where his medals and orders should be, there is a pointed absence. Goya has rubbed away the chalk where he had indicated them as though they were a distraction, a screen to be lifted to reveal the human truth that they obscure.

Here we see and understand as I suspect nowhere else, the full complexity of the man, whose greatness as a soldier was not just his courage, though he had plenty, but his intellect; he was the model of the modern soldier. He believed in discipline, but would not waste his soldiers' lives; he pioneered the use of intelligence in the field, displayed sympathy with the people in whose country he was fighting and imagination in dealing with allies who were in the fullest sense irregular. I have spent time on this drawing not just because I think it is truly remarkable, but also because the story this exhibition tells begins with Wellington. In the Peninsular War, Spain changed in the popular imagination from the simple bogeyman of the Armada into a still remote, but exotic and fascinating nation.

The exhibition explores how this was played out for the next century and a half in the developing reputation of Spanish art. The core of the show is a group of Spanish old masters, including the NGS's Velazquez, the Old Woman cooking Eggs, its two El Grecos and single Zurbaran, the two El Grecos from Pollock House and the extraordinary Zurbaran, St Francis, whose purchase by the National Gallery in London created a scandal in the mid-19th century. There are also four of the remarkable and much less familiar Zurbaran prophets from Bishop Auckland, several beautiful Murillos and a handsome Ribera from Perth Museum.

But this collecting was also paralleled in an artistic dialogue between British artists, Spain and Spanish art. It was a dialogue in which Scottish artists played a central role. Indeed Wilkie was the pioneer. Wellington was his patron and so Wilkie became familiar with the Spanish pictures that he had brought back from his campaigns.

These included the spectacular Portrait of a Gentleman by Velazquez, which is a star here. When Wilkie got the chance he himself travelled to Spain, a country hitherto almost unknown to northern artists, and his later style is shaped by his admiration for Velazquez and Murillo.

A beautiful example here is The Spanish Mother, a tender and romantic image of mother and child. Wilkie also had a huge success with his pictures inspired by the Peninsular War and three of them hang here. I am afraid, however, that whenever Goya is included in an exhibition, no-one else can compete. It is simply not fair to hang Wilkie's Spanish pictures near Goya's etchings of the Disasters of War, nor indeed to make a direct comparison between the former's hugely successful painting, the Defence of Saragossa, and Goya's stark etching of the same scene. In both pictures a woman, the Maid of Saragossa, dominates the composition, standing up and braving gunfire to fire a cannon.

In Wilkie's picture she is surrounded by heroic menfolk in theatrical attitudes. In Goya's she is alone. All those around her are dead and, her head and shoulders in darkness, the shadow of death already touches her too.

The comparison is not fair because, although his was on the whole a gentler world, at his best Wilkie is also one of the greatest artists of his time, but here he is already playing to his audience, exploiting the romantic sentimentalisation of Spain.

The only artist who could perhaps hold his own with Goya, as a portrait painter at least, is Raeburn, but he is absent – although in fact he is very relevant here. He was the first northern artist to respond to Velazquez. The Spaniard's great portrait of Innocent X that he saw and studied in Rome was a formative influence on his art and so he stands at the head of the tradition presented here.

Wilkie was followed to Spain by his friend David Roberts, who developed a new genre of urban landscape recording the buildings and dramatic townscapes of the country. The Moorish Tower at Seville by Roberts is a masterpiece in this new manner. John "Spanish" Philip not only followed Wilkie to Spain but also emulated both his passion for Velazquez and his sentimentalisation of Spanish life. Philip's copy of Las Meninas here is a masterly homage to the Spanish master. His La Gloria was for a long time the most expensive painting ever bought by the National Gallery of Scotland. A picture of dramatic contrasts, both visual and emotional, it reduces Spanish life to a kind of sentimental chiaroscuro, but is impressive nonetheless. If Phillip's Spain is sentimental, Arthur Melville's is pure visual drama. His Mediterranean Port of 1892 is a glowing masterpiece of liberated light and colour. If Melville seems to anticipate Matisse or Derain, French art had also been influenced by the great Spaniards, but by a different route.

In the 1840s Louis Philippe's collection of Spanish art in the Louvre had inspired a generation of painters, not by its voluptuousness, but by its suave austerity. This shaped the art of Manet and after him of Whistler, Sargent and Lavery, all well represented here. Indeed Lavery's magnificent portrait of RB Cunnighame Graham, Don Roberto as he was known, fittingly celebrates a great Scottish Hispanophile and Nationalist while paying tribute to Whistler, Manet and their model, Velazquez.

In an epilogue, the exhibition also explores the impact in Britain of the Spanish Civil War. Picasso's Guernica came to London to promote the Republican cause and Roland Penrose acquired two magnificent related works by Picasso at this time. Both are here. British artists also recorded their reaction to the war in some remarkable images. Edward Burra's War in the Sun is an extraordinary evocation of the peculiarly sinister character of civil war. Wyndham Lewis's Surrender of Barcelona is equally impressive. There is a slight problem in this context, however. The picture was no shout of liberal outrage. Lewis was on the wrong side. He backed the Fascists.

&#149 Until 11 October. Part of the Edinburgh Art Festival, www.edinburghartfestival.org