Based on the research of John Marciari, currently curator of European art and head of provenance research at the San Diego Museum of Art and formerly the Nina and Lee Griggs associate curator of early European art at the Yale University Art Gallery, the Seventeenth Century Spanish painting portraying the “Education of the Virgin” in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery has been reattributed to Diego Velazquez.
The painting was donated to the gallery in 1925 by Henry Hotchkiss Townshend, BA 1897, LLB 1901, and Raynham Townshend, MD, BS 1900s. It is thought to have been in the Townsend family for at least 40 years and was in poor condition when it arrived at the gallery. Prior to the current attribution, the painting was considered to be by an unknown artist from Seville, Spain. The work is now believed to have been painted by Velazquez in Seville around 1617, making it one of the artist’s earliest works. The painting is currently being studied in advance of conservation treatment and is not on view.
As part of the gallery’s renovation and expansion project †which began with the renovation of its 1953 Louis Kahn building in 2003 and continues now with the renovation and expansion of the 1928 Egerton Swartwout building and the 1866 Street Hall, designed by Peter Bonnett Wight †the gallery completed a thorough and extensive review of its collections. Curators, working closely with the gallery’s conservation staff, have been studying works both with the naked eye and with conservation techniques that make visible the underlayers of the objects. In some instances, this research has resulted in new attributions, a long process involving technical and documentary research, visual analysis and consultation between curators and their specialist colleagues throughout the world.
The Velazquez painting discussed in Marciari’s article for the July⁓eptember 2010 issue of Ars magazine is the result of six years of research and analysis.
Yale University Art Gallery is at the corner of Chapel and York Streets. For information, www.artgallery.yale.edu or 203-432-0600.
