Zurbarán - 1598-1664

Francisco de Zurbarán ranks, together with Diego Velázquez and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, among the most important Spanish painters of the 17th century. Initially regarded as Caravaggisti marked by monastic asceticism, he was gradually recognized in the twentieth century as a prodigious colorist and celebrated for his very personal style, which combines the simplification of volumes with striking naturalism. The National Gallery, London, the Louvre Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago have therefore decided to join forces to present a retrospective that will allow visitors to discover or revisit his painting, to better understand it, and to be dazzled by the modernity and the expressive power of his compositions.

The aim of this exhibition is not to provide an exhaustive monograph, but rather an ambitious selection of high-quality paintings, accompanied by historical and cultural references, enabling viewers to admire Zurbarán's technique, his formal and iconographic audacity. The display organized into seven sections approaches the different facets of Zurbarán's painted oeuvre in a chrono-thematic logic that does justice to the arc of his long career, while at times breaking away from chronology to propose groupings of works.

The Louvre's exhibition will accord great importance to monumental paintings from monastic commissions in Andalusia, which made Zurbarán's reputation, but also to portraits and still lifes, reserving a special place for the brief production of his son Juan de Zurbarán (1620–1649). A few paintings, dating from the late 19th century and the early 20th century, will allow us to evoke in epilogue the importance of Zurbarán for the French avant-gardes (Édouard Manet, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris).