Zurbarán, Brussels

Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664), Palais des Beaux-Arts (BOZAR), Brussels, 29 January – 25 May 2014. Transferred from the Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara. It is the first large exhibition (12 rooms) on the artist to be held outside Spain since the 1988 survey shown in New York and Paris. It displays several major works from private collections and a newly discovered painting Saint Anthony of Padua (1635-40), which was formerly in the nineteenth-century collection of the British vice-consul in Seville, Julian Williams, before it was presented by a later owner to the parish church of Étréham in Normandy, where it was recently discovered and conserved for display in the exhibition for the first time. Other important loans include Ashur and Levi, two of the sons from the series of Jacob and his Twelve Sons, from the display at Auckland Castle, which will join Benjamin lent by the anonymous family member of Willoughby de Eresby of Grimsthorpe Castle, Lincolnshire. Another discovery is The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1638-40) which was presented to Seattle Art Museum in 2012 and a late Saint John the Baptist (1659) from a Spanish private collection, which is now accepted as fully autograph by Odile Delenda, author of Zurbarán’s catalogue raisonné. Also included are two still-lifes by Francisco de Zurbarán’s son Juan, who died of the plague in 1649, one formerly owned by the British art historian and Apollo Magazine editor Denys Sutton and now owned by the Moscow collector Inna Bazhenova, who publishes The Art Newspaper Russia. A downloadable 15-page leaflet-guide to the exhibition is available online at www.bozar.be.