Waching daily Apr 4 2017

Welcome once again to the Museo del Prado, this time on the occasion

of the exhibition "Treasures from the Hispanic Society Museum and Library of New York".

An important exhibition.

An interesting exhibition for many reasons.

Firstly, due to the quality of the truly remarkable works, rarely seen in Spain

until now and some never previously exhibited at the Prado

or in any other Spanish institution.

But also because the Hispanic Society offers the viewer a global understanding

of the history of Spanish art and culture.

Unique and special due to its wide-ranging chronological span,

it opens with objects from the Bell Beaker culture and ends with paintings from the 1920s.

Secondly, because it is not limited to the Iberian Peninsula,

as the Hispanic Society also includes works made in the Philippines and in Latin America in a natural way,

and also because it is not just a museum but also a library,

an exceptional library, the finest holdings of early books after the Biblioteca Nacional de España.

All this reflects the wishes and aspirations of a collector, Huntington,

who dreamed since his childhood of having a Spanish museum and whose financial position

enabled him to see that dream become reality with the opening of the Hispanic Society in Manhattan in 1908.

Arthur Huntington started to collect aged just twelve with the purchase of a book

by George Borrow on the gypsies in Spain

and with that book he fell in love with Spanish culture.

He continued to collect books, he studied Spanish and just a few years later

he built up a collection of rare books and manuscripts.

After the death of his father in 1900 he had more funds for collecting paintings

and the decorative arts and twenty years later he had assembled a museum filled with objects.

In a way, what the Hispanic Society offers is a type of compendium

of the Museo Arqueológico, the Museo de América, the Museo del Prado and the Biblioteca Nacional.

No other institution, either in Spain or abroad, has such wide-ranging,

rich and varied holdings which allow for that global understanding of Spanish culture.

By the end of 2015 the need to undertake renovation work

on the Hispanic Society's original building where the museum's galleries are housed

offered the possibility of organising an exhibition of its treasures.

This is the first time the Hispanic has lent a large part of its most important works

to an exhibition and specifically for this exhibition the Prado has generously restored

the portrait of the Duchess of Alba, which needed cleaning to reveal its original state.

Goya's portrait of Manuel Lapeña

and other 19th-century portraits by the Madrazos have also been restored.

Work has also been carried out on works by Muñoz, Zurbarán and Cano,

and the results have been spectacular.

This is an exhibition which tells us many things about Huntington's passion.

It tells us many things about the image that Spain had in the United States

in the early 20th century.

But it also tells us a great deal about ourselves, about the problems we have

in assimilating specific periods of Spanish history,

our inability to naturally assimilate Latin America within our discourses on Spain,

and in a way it tells us about that Spanish inability

to preserve the memory of our great men.

At this moment I am surrounded by an exceptional and sadly unique iconographic gallery

which represents the flower of Spanish intellectual life at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Sadly in Spain we were unable to assemble a similar roll-call of portraits

of our great names and one thus has to go to the United States to appreciate it,

although thanks to this exhibition it can now be seen at the Museo del Prado.