Spanish Painting

The original Spanish paintings in the National Gallery dated from the age of the spiritually religious Ferdinand and Isabella, who controlled from 1474 until 1504, arresting sacred harmony over the diverse districts of the Iberian Peninsula as a means of achieving political supremacy. 

A famous slogan of the country’s international sightseeing crusade once stated that Spain is different. This slogan specially suits for the Spanish painters. Major painters of the 20th century include Juan Gris, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, and Picasso – with Picasso being extensively considered as the most inventive artist of the century.

The seventeenth century's interest in the substance world promoted a new realism in painting and saw the opening of worldly subjects such as still life and genre scenes and conquered by such masters as Juan van der Hamen y León, Francisco de Zurbarán, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Juan de Valdés Leal, and, above all, Diego Velázquez, the century has since been thought of as a golden age of Spanish painting.