Artists

Edition IV/X

From the portfolio La Flûte Double

Interior hall of the Mosque of Cordoba with multiple rows of columns and arches. The arches have a striped pattern.

Tumbling angels support the Virgin Mary as she graciously accepts the crown as Queen of Heaven. During the mid-1660s, the Coronation of the Virgin was a very popular subject in Catholic circles, especially in Spain. Francisco Ribalta treated the theme with remarkable dynamism and originality. He applied wash to strengthen the vigorous pen work and to unite the composition. The arched upper section suggests that he made the drawing in preparation for an altar painting.

Emerging from deep shadows behind a table, a solemn individual stands displaying a well-worn book with various geometric figures, pseudo-Greek characters, and an imaginary script. Jusepe de Ribera paid considerable attention to the man's facial details, from the unkempt beard to the distinctive creases of his high forehead and the irregular folds of the lids above his dark, penetrating eyes. He depicted the wise man with tattered clothes and blackened, grimy fingers to emphasize the subject's devotion to intellectual, rather than material, pursuits.

The presence of mathematical diagrams in the illegible book reveal the figure's identity as Euclid, a prominent mathematician from antiquity, best known for his treatise on geometry, the Elements. Portraits of wise men were very popular in the 1600s, when there was a revived interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. Rather than portraying the subject as a refined and noble figure, Ribera depicted him as an indiv

Francisco Rizi made this complete decorative and architectural design for a cupola, a small dome of a church. The central compartment depicts the Virgin Mary and Christ seated amid clouds and framed on four sides by pairs of putti supporting balustrades. In the lower right corner, Rizi drew a prophet. Rizi was Madrid's major practitioner of illusionistic architectural painting, or quadratura, which Italian artists had introduced earlier in the 1600s. The building for which this design was intended is not known.

In a richly brocaded robe, with rosy cheeks, shining eyes, and outstretched arms, Saint Ginés de la Jara appeals to the faithful standing before him. His gestures and open mouth suggest that he is preaching. According to legend, after Saint Ginés was decapitated in southern France, he picked up his head and tossed it into the Rhône River. Carried by the sea to the coast of southeastern Spain, it was retrieved and conserved as a relic. Life-sized, devotional cult objects often included glass eyes and were often made out of wood that could be painted in order to achieve lifelike results. Reinforcing the emotional experience of the faithful, such heightened realism typified Spanish Baroque art at a time when the Catholic Church sought to make Christianity more accessible to believers.

Luisa Roldán, also called La Roldana, carved the work. The figure was polychromed by her brother-in-law, Tomás de los Arcos, who used the Spanish technique of estofado to replicate the brocaded ecclesiastical garments. In this process, the area of the figure's garment was first covered in gold leaf and painted over with brown paint, and then incised with a stylus to reveal the gold underneath.

Although sometimes associated with the Impressionist and Symbolists who painted at the same time, Sorolla remained independent of a specific art movement. At the same time, he created some of the most modern paintings of the early 20th century. A 1909 solo show in New York featured 356 of his paintings and introduced him to an American audience. Touted as “the Spanish painter of sunlight and color” by the New York Times, 169,000 visitors attended the show in about a month. He was soon given a commission for a series of murals celebrating traditional life in Spain for the Hispanic Society of America, which he painted between 1911 and 1919. Milwaukee was at the forefront of Sorolla’s popularity in America. “Drawing in the Sand” was a gift to the Milwaukee Art Institute in 1911 from its early president, Samuel O. Buckner (Catherine Sawinski, Assistant Curator of European Art)

Handsome and proud, Pepilla sits with one arm around her daughter's shoulders and her other hand on her hip. Both mother and daughter gaze directly out at the viewer. Just as the mother's gesture tenderly protects yet presents her daughter, Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida expressed tenderness in his portraits of Spanish people, particularly women and children.

With his typical spontaneous, broad brushwork, Sorolla reveled in the effects of the warm Mediterranean light and air on the colors and patterns in the women's costumes. He preferred to paint even portraits outdoors, trying to achieve a spontaneous effect. "[N]o matter how much labor you may have expended on the canvas, the result should look as if it had all been done with ease and at a sitting," he said in 1909.

Surrounded by a diverse array of onlookers, the Byzantine emperor Heraclius kneels and prepares to raise the holy cross. Barefoot and clad in drab robes, Heraclius has abandoned his fine clothing in order to pass through the gate of Jerusalem with humility. Standing beside Heraclius and clad in a bishop's mitre and white robe is the patriarch of Constantinople, Zachariah. Around this central pair, several spectators have dropped to their knees at the sight of the cross. In 628 A.D., having recovered the true cross from the Persians, Heraclius appeared at the gate of Jerusalem intending to enter in triumph. But as he and his followers approached the gate, stones fell from the walls, blocking his passage. An angel appeared and told him that in his opulent clothes, he could not enter through the same gate that Christ had humbly entered riding on a donkey. The message of this story is clear: the kingdom of heaven is open only to those who have forsaken the riches of the material world. The Exaltation of the Cross, in the form of a narrative series, appeared in several early Renaissance frescoes. But it is a subject rarely represented in painting. Juan de Valdés Leal frequently used painted sketches to work out his ideas for large-scale compositions. This oil sketch was created for his last major commission, a monumental fresco for the church of the Hospital de la Caridad in Seville, Spain. This preparatory sketch highlights Valdés Leal's agitated brushwork, thick impasto, vivid coloring, and dramatic sense of movement. Such painterly spontaneity perhaps reflects the spiritual fervor of this famously volatile painter.

A highly successful and ruthless general, Don Juan José of Austria suppressed an anti-Spanish uprising in Naples when he was only eighteen years old. This scene shows his triumphal entry following the suppression of the revolt. A young fisherman had led a protest against a new tax on fruit imposed by the aristocracy; the protest later turned into an insurrection aiming at slaughtering the nobility. As the general leads his cavalry into the city, trampling a child underfoot, he receives the homage of the population in the person of the bearded man kneeling to the left, who offers a platter containing three utensils, perhaps representing the keys of the city.

José Ximénez Donoso copied the equestrian figure from a well-known etching by Jusepe de Ribera but added soldiers and spectators to the background. The artist drew the whole scene in black chalk but reinforced the forms of Don José and his horse, copied from the print, in pen and brown ink. The drawing is squared for transfer, implying that the composition was intended for a painting or perhaps a print.