MADRID.- The Museo Nacional del Prado continues its efforts to revitalise and highlight the merits of its extensive nineteenth-century painting collections with a new exhibition devoted solely to the painter Antonio Muñoz Degrain (1840–1924). An artist who often operated outside the prevailing trends of his time, Muñoz Degrain is now the protagonist of Room 60 at the museum, where ten works spanning his entire artistic career are on display.


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The selection includes iconic pieces like Landscape at El Pardo, Mist Rising (1866), recently restored for this occasion and considered the artist’s finest landscape. The painting’s loose brushwork, slightly reminiscent of Velázquez in certain aspects, and astonishing conveyance of atmosphere earned Muñoz Degrain a medal at the 1866 National Exhibition. Works like Memories of Granada (1881) in Room 63 A and View of Granada and Sierra Nevada (c.1915) illustrate his subjective, evocative approach to landscape painting, blurring the line between imagination and reality.


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The exhibition also recalls his facet as a painter of historical and literary themes. The preparatory sketch in pencil for his most famous composition, The Lovers of Teruel, exhibited in Room 75, offers insight into his creative process. The vibrant colours and loose brushwork of Before the Wedding—which depicts Isabel de Segura, one of the lovers featured in the previous painting—point to a Venetian influence.

The artist’s fascination with exotic North Africa in The Moroccan Eavesdroppers (1879), religious painting in Jesus at Tiberias (1909) and ordinary details in Corner of a Toledo Courtyard (1904) confirm his versatility and constant search for new pictorial languages. Additionally, the Interior of Muñoz Degrain’s Valencia Studio, painted by his friend Francisco Domingo Marqués, is a valuable record of artistic life and the importance of the picture in nineteenth-century Valencia.

This presentation is the latest in a series of small, mono-thematic exhibitions which the Prado has been organising since 2009 to offer audiences interesting selections from the museum's vast nineteenth-century collection. To date, these shows have featured artists like Aureliano de Beruete, Rogelio de Egusquiza, Genaro Pérez Villaamil, Federico de Madrazo, Antonio María Esquivel, Francisco Pradilla, Joaquín Sorolla, Eduardo Rosales and José de Madrazo (drawings); specific media, such as watercolour in the time of Fortuny and his followers; themes, e.g. mid- century religious painting and child portraits in the Romantic period; and donations, like the gift received from Hans Rudolf Gerstenmaier. Other subjects include the sculptor Miguel Blay and nineteenth-century Japanese prints.



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