Anyone who had the good fortune to see the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2003 “Manet/Velázquez” exhibition came away from that remarkable show with a deep understanding of how Diego Velázquez began in the nineteenth century to replace Raphael as the “painter of painters.” (Gary Tinterow’s essay on this subject is highly recommended.) Velázquez (1599–1660), along with Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–1682), Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652), and other Spanish masters, introduced realism where there had been idealism, created brushy surfaces where there had been polish, and found street urchins and old maids to be subjects as worthy as monarchs and Madonnas.
Now at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, “Americans in Spain” takes up many of these ideas, concentrating on the influence of Velázquez on the work of William Merritt Chase, John Singer Sargent, Robert Henri, Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, James McNeill Whistler, and Thomas Eakins. Even if this exhibition (co-curated by Corey Piper of the Chrysler and Brandon Ruud of the Milwaukee Art Museum, where the exhibition will next travel) had held only works by these Americans, it would be worth seeing. But the presence of paintings and etchings by El Greco, Ribera, Velázquez, Murillo, Goya, and Manet makes it a very strong show indeed, in spite of some irritating curatorial intrusions.
The exhibition opens with David Wilkie’s Washington Irving in the Archives