MADRID.- Plácido Arango, president of the Royal Board of Trustees of the Museo del Prado, Miguel Zugaza, director of the Prado, and other senior representatives of the Prado today met the members of the Board of Trustees of the Museo de Arte de Ponce, led by its president, María Luisa Ferré, and the Museum’s director, Augustín Arteaga. They had travelled to Spain in order to sign the agreement that will allow the Prado to present the exhibition The Sleeping Beauty. Victorian Painting from the Museo de Arte de Ponce

In accordance with the terms of the agreement signed at 7.30pm this evening, in 2009 the Museo del Prado will display a selection of 19th-century English paintings from the Museo de Arte de Ponce, which possesses one of the most highly regarded collections of western art, of outstanding beauty and quality. Entitled The Sleeping Beauty. Victorian Painting from the Museo de Arte de Ponce (24 February to 31 May 2009), the exhibition will offer the Spanish public a unique opportunity to see works as celebrated as Flaming June by Frederic Lord Leighton and Edward Burne-Jones’ masterpiece The Dream of Arthur in Avalon.

For historical reasons British art is little represented in Spanish collections including the Prado, which only possesses around 30 works from this school, of which just over ten date from the 19th century, most of them portraits. For this reason, and coinciding with the modernisation of the Museo de Arte in Ponce de San Juan, Puerto Rico, the Prado suggested that the two museums collaborate with the aim of temporarily enriching a visit to its own collections through the loan of an important selection of the remarkable holdings of Victorian paintings in Ponce.

The exhibition will be curated by Gabriele Finaldi, Associate Director of Curatorship at the Museo del Prado.