The Louvre opens Zurbarán 1598-1664 on Wednesday 7 October, in the Hall Napoléon, until 25 January 2027. Sixty-five paintings are on show, 50 of them by Francisco de Zurbarán himself, in a retrospective organised with the National Gallery in London and the Art Institute of Chicago. In the same space, with a shared design, the Louvre presents 23 Spanish sculptures from the Museo Nacional de Escultura in Valladolid, among them a complete processional float of five life-size painted figures by Gregorio Fernández. Paris is the second stop of a tour that began in London in May. But the Louvre sets its show against the last large-scale international presentation of his work, mounted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Grand Palais in 1987-1988, nearly four decades ago.
65 paintings in seven parts
The organisation is broad. The curator is Charlotte Chastel-Rousseau, executive curator in the Louvre’s Department of Paintings, working with Francesca Whitlum-Cooper and Daniel Sobrino Ralston of the National Gallery and Rebecca Long of the Art Institute of Chicago. In the words of the Louvre’s exhibition page, “The visit, organised into seven parts, will analyse the various facets of Zurbarán’s painted oeuvre both chronologically and thematically”. Among the 15 paintings by other hands are works by his son, Juan de Zurbarán, who lived from 1620 to 1649 and has a section of his own. There are also paintings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries that show, according to the Louvre, the influence Zurbarán exerted on later artists working in France, such as Édouard Manet, Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris. The sections follow his career from Seville to Madrid, through the Merced Calzada monastery, the Hall of Realms in the Buen Retiro Palace, the Jerez Charterhouse, the series of Jacob and his sons, the female saints and the still lifes. The catalogue, published with Éditions du Seuil, has 336 pages and costs 45 euros.
Saints, monks and a lamb
The pictures are what people come for. In 1628, the year of Peter Nolasco’s canonisation, the Merced Calzada in Seville commissioned twenty-two paintings on the saint’s life, among them, in the Louvre’s words, “the touching Saint Serapion, for the monastery’s funerary chapel”, now at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. For the Hall of Realms in Madrid, Zurbarán painted ten of the twelve labours of Hercules; Hercules and Cerberus, from the Prado, comes from that commission. From the Charterhouse at Jerez de la Frontera come The Adoration of the Magi and The Circumcision, now in Grenoble. The female saints are one of his specialities. The Louvre writes that Zurbarán “specialised particularly in the depiction of magnificently garbed female saints”, and Saint Casilda, from the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, is the image it has chosen for the exhibition. The still lifes are few. “Francisco de Zurbarán painted some few but striking still lifes,” in the Louvre’s words, with objects that “stand out against a dark background”. The Prado’s Agnus Dei, the bound lamb of about 1635-1640, belongs to the same silence. The Holy Face, lent by the Valladolid museum, introduces both exhibitions.
“Now, the National Gallery, London, the Musée du Louvre and the Art Institute of Chicago have joined forces to offer their visitors a retrospective that allows them to revisit Zurbarán’s paintings (or discover them for the first time), to better understand his work and to stand in awe of the modernity and visual power of his compositions.” Musée du Louvre, on Zurbarán 1598-1664.
Sculpting Colour and the Road to Calvary
The sculptures make the second half of the visit. Sculpting Colour brings 23 works from the Museo Nacional de Escultura in Valladolid, all on loan under an exclusive partnership, with Valérie Carpentier-Vanhaverbeke of the Louvre and Alejandro Nuevo Gómez, director of the Valladolid museum, as curators. Its first room holds an entire paso, a processional float of five life-size sculpted and painted figures: the Road to Calvary by Gregorio Fernández, commissioned in 1614 by a penitential confraternity of Valladolid, according to the museum, and shown at eye level. The Louvre calls it one of the most significant loans of the exhibition, never before seen in France. Beside it are Fernández’s Christ of Light, a life-size Christ, and Alonso Cano’s Saint John the Baptist, which the Louvre calls his most masterful work. Pedro de Mena’s Immaculate Conception, dated 1680, and Luisa Roldán’s Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist, both recent acquisitions of the Valladolid museum, complete the group. Roldán, the Louvre notes, was one of the rare women whose career took her to the royal court of Spain. The Sculpting Colour catalogue has 168 pages and costs 29 euros.
From Extremadura to Madrid, 1598-1664
His life followed the commissions. Born in 1598 in Extremadura, at Fuente de Cantos according to the Prado and the National Gallery, Zurbarán began a three-year apprenticeship in Seville in 1614 and settled in Llerena in 1617. In 1626 he received his first major commission in Seville, from the Dominicans of San Pablo el Real, and in 1630 the city granted him the title of master painter without the examination the painters’ guild required. In 1634 he was called to Madrid to work on the Hall of Realms. The monastic cycles followed, for the Charterhouse at Jerez in 1638-1639 and for the royal monastery of Guadalupe in 1639. Plague struck Seville in 1649 and killed his son Juan, his main collaborator. In 1658 Zurbarán settled in Madrid, where, the Louvre recalls, he rejoined the friend of his youth, Diego Velázquez, and spoke in his favour when Velázquez sought to become a Knight of the Order of Santiago. He died in 1664, aged 65. The Louvre places him with Velázquez and Murillo among the greatest Spanish painters of the 17th century.
Zurbarán and the Louvre, since 1838
The Louvre has a history with him. “Between 1838 and 1848, Louis Philippe, King of the French (r. 1830-1848), opened a Spanish Gallery in the Louvre, igniting a passion for Spain,” the Louvre recalls, and the Romantic generation of painters and writers, it adds, thrilled to his monks and saints. At the turn of the 20th century, Picasso and Juan Gris saw the strict geometry of his compositions as a precursor. The tour gives each city its own claim. The National Gallery called its leg, from 2 May to 23 August 2026, the first exhibition ever devoted to the artist in the United Kingdom. The Art Institute of Chicago, which follows from 28 February to 20 June 2027, calls its show the first in the United States in 40 years. Paris adds the companion sculptures from Valladolid. This autumn the city also has Remember Me at the Bourse de Commerce, while the National Gallery, the first stop of the tour, is showing Renoir and Love until 31 January 2027.
The Luxury.it perspective
The phrase to keep from the Louvre’s text is “the silent presence of objects”. It is the title the Louvre gives to its pages on the still lifes of the elder Zurbarán, and it describes the whole exhibition: white habits, a bound lamb, a cloth with a face on it, all against a dark ground. In a museum as large as the Louvre, that silence is the reason to go. The practical advice is to book a time slot, which the Louvre strongly recommends, and to choose a Wednesday or Friday, when the museum stays open until 21.00. Tickets cost 22 euros for residents of the European Economic Area and 32 euros for other visitors, and they include the permanent collections; under-18s and EEA residents under 26 enter free. Allow an hour and a quarter for the paintings, and leave time for the paso, which is meant to be seen up close.
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