PARIS — The Louvre opened a sweeping retrospective of Francisco de Zurbarán on Wednesday, the first exhibition in the French capital in decades devoted entirely to the 17th-century Spanish painter best known for his austere depictions of monks, saints and still lifes.
"Zurbarán (1598-1664)," organized by the Louvre with London's National Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago, runs through Jan. 25 in the museum's Hall Napoléon, where it is being shown alongside a companion exhibition, "Sculpting Colour," that places Zurbarán's work in dialogue with contemporary Spanish sculpture. The show is organized into seven sections and was curated by Charlotte Chastel-Rousseau of the Louvre with Francesca Whitlum-Cooper and Daniel Sobrino Ralston of the National Gallery and Rebecca Long of the Art Institute of Chicago.
A Painter Rediscovered Alongside His Peers
Zurbarán worked in Seville in the same decades as Diego Velázquez and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, and today ranks with them among the defining painters of Spain's Golden Age, though he has drawn fewer major Paris surveys than either. Among the works traveling for the exhibition is a version of "Saint Francis of Assisi" from the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, which the art-market publication Artprice singled out as one of the show's highlights. Zurbarán painted the subject repeatedly over his career, turning the saint's hooded habit and skull-in-hand iconography into one of the most recognizable images of 17th-century Spanish devotional painting.
The Louvre is pairing the exhibition with a free in-gallery app and has scheduled a concert by the vocal ensemble Cantoría, led by Jorge Losana, to mark the opening. Standard admission is listed at 22 euros for European Union visitors and 32 euros for visitors from outside the bloc, with free entry for EU residents under 26 and all visitors under 18.
The exhibition's arrival was timed into an unusually dense autumn for Paris museumgoers: the Musée d'Orsay's Mary Cassatt retrospective, which opened last week, is drawing its own crowds just across the Seine, giving the city a rare concentration of major shows running through the winter. Zurbarán ran one of Seville's busiest workshops in his lifetime, supplying devotional paintings to monasteries across Spain and, through colonial trade routes, to churches in Spanish America, which helps explain why his canvases are now scattered across collections on both sides of the Atlantic.
