Rokeby Venus - Provenance

Provenance

The Rokeby Venus was long held to be one of Velázquez's final works. In 1951, it was found recorded in an inventory of June 1, 1651 from the collection of Gaspar Méndez de Haro, 7th Marquis of Carpio, a close associate of Philip IV of Spain. Haro was the great-nephew of Velázquez's first patron, the Count-Duke of Olivares, and a notorious libertine. According to the art historian Dawson Carr, Haro "loved paintings almost as much as he loved women", and "even his panegyrists lamented his excessive taste for lower-class women during his youth". For these reasons it seemed likely that he would have commissioned the painting. However, in 2001 the art historian Ángel Aterido discovered that the painting had first belonged to the Madrid art dealer and painter Domingo Guerra Coronel, and was sold to Haro in 1652 following Coronel's death the previous year. Coronel's ownership of the painting raises a number of questions: how and when it came into Coronel's possession, and why Velázquez's name was omitted from Coronel's inventory. The art critic Javier Portús has suggested that the omission may have been due to the painting's portrayal of a female nude, "a type of work which was carefully supervised and whose dissemination was considered problematic".

These revelations make the painting difficult to date. Velázquez's painting technique offers no assistance, although its strong emphasis on colour and tone suggest that the work dates from his mature period. The best estimates of its origin put its completion in the late 1640s or early 1650s, either in Spain or during Velázquez's last visit to Italy. If this is the case, then the breadth of handling and the dissolution of form can be seen to mark the beginning of the artist's final period. The conscientious modelling and strong tonal contrasts of his earlier work are here replaced by a restraint and subtlety which would culminate in his late masterpiece, Las Meninas.

The painting passed from Haro into the collection of his daughter Catalina de Haro y Guzmán, the eighth Marchioness of Carpio, and her husband, Francisco Álvarez de Toledo, the tenth Duke of Alba. In 1802, Charles IV of Spain ordered the family to sell the painting (with other works) to Manuel de Godoy, his favourite and chief minister. He hung it alongside two masterpieces by Francisco Goya that he may have commissioned himself, The Nude Maja and The Clothed Maja. These bear obvious compositional similarities with Velázquez's Venus, although unlike Velázquez, Goya clearly painted his nude in a calculated attempt to provoke shame and disgust in the relatively unenlightened climate of 18th-century Spain.

Venus was brought to England in 1813, where it was purchased by John Morritt for £500 (£ 25,000 in 2012), and on the advice of his friend Sir Thomas Lawrence. Morritt hung it in his house at Rokeby Park, Yorkshire—thus the painting's popular name. In 1906, the painting was acquired for the National Gallery by the newly created National Art Collections Fund, its first campaigning triumph. King Edward VII greatly admired the painting, and anonymously provided £8,000 (£ 640,000 in 2012) towards its purchase, and became Patron of the Fund thereafter.