After El Greco and Velázquez, Zurbarán is generally accepted as the third greatest painter of Spain in its great painting age, about 1575-1675. Of the other plausible candidates, Ribera is apparently disqualified for emigrating (an immigrant, like El Greco, is all right) and because he alone focused on earthy facts, with respect to both visual appearances and social references. What is wanted evidently is something a bit grand and also distanced. Murillo did get on the list in the Victorian period, with Velázquez and Zurbarán, but now he seems too Victorian by far; his beggar boys and immaculate virgins alike seem sugary, though it could well happen that a select list of his driest works could re-emerge in postmodern taste. They are also his most personal, and it was perhaps his assistants who heaped on the sugar in their repeat versions of his subjects.

Yet Zurbarán’s third is a very distant one. He is unknown to much of the public that is knowledgeable about Velázquez and deeply so about El Greco. So he is the right candidate for the large one-man show which was installed in the Metropolitan in New York in September, and which will afterwards be seen in Paris.[1]It sets up a lot of questions, some of them awkward, but their presence is in large part the cost of the exhibition’s virtues. It is a standard kind of serious assemblage of an old master who is well worth emphasizing in this way. The show