Resumen de Lord Grantham and the Taste for Velázquez: 'The Electrical Eel of the Day'
Nigel Glendinning, Enriqueta Harris, Francis Russell
The visual culture of Spain was virtually unknown in eighteenth-century Britain. Few Grand Tourists ventured into the peninsula, where the roads and hostelries were uninviting and the capital was said to offer nine months of winter followed by three of infernal heat. Inevitably, therefore, the artists of Spain's Golden Age were underappreciated by Britons, though an awareness of Murillo had been stimulated by late seventeenth-century and, early eighteenth-century collectors such as Lord Godolphin, Sir Paul Methuen, Lord Harrington and Sir Robert Walpole.1 If Velazquez was admired at all, it was for his portrait of Pope Innocent X, which could be seen in Rome, rather than for the full range of his art, contained as it then was largely within the walls of the Royal Palaces of Madrid and in the churches and houses of Seville. Nor did prints serve to broaden the view, some later ones being positively misleading, so that while Velazquez's name may have been familiar from publications, his work was still far from being established in the British artistic consciousness. Indeed, when the Water-seller of Seville and the Young men at table arrived in Britain in 1814, they were listed as by Caravaggio in the first inventory of the Duke of Wellington's collection.
