Assumption of the Virgin

1659 · National Gallery of Art, Washington

religious

The dramatic side of seventeenth-century Spanish painting is well represented by Juan de Valdés Leal. He tended to give expression to the pessimism of the Baroque, which, for all his religious idealism, he was sometimes unable to suppress and which inspired theatrical visions. Impetuous, dynamic, a bold colorist who experimented with the principles of defocusing, Valdés Leal was a forerunner of Romanticism.

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About the Artist

Juan de Valdés Leal

1622 – 1690

Spanish painter and engraver, born in Seville, where he worked from 1656 after some early years in Cordova. With Murillo he helped to found an academy of painting there in 1660, and after Murillo's death in 1682 he was the leading artist in the city. Like Murillo, he was primarily a religious painter, but he was very different in style and approach. He had a penchant for macabre or grotesque subject-matter, and his style is characterized by feverish excitability, with a vivid sense of movement, brilliant colouring, and dramatic lighting. His most remarkable works are two large Allegories of Death (commissioned 1672) in the Hospital de la Caridad, Seville. He also polychromed Roldán 's great altarpiece in the Caridad.

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