The Grandest Artistic Gamble: Copying All of Velázquez

An Idea Born in London

In the history of art, ambitious projects are not rare. But José Moya del Pino's Exhibiciones Velázquez — his years-long effort to copy every Velázquez in the Prado and take the collection abroad to share with the world — stands in a category of its own: not merely ambitious but genuinely, almost recklessly, singular.

The idea had been forming since 1912, when Moya, on a visit to the Royal College of Art at the University of Kensington in London, stumbled upon an exhibition of black-and-white carbon photographs of Velázquez's paintings. The public's enthusiastic response astonished him. If people responded this powerfully to poor-quality monochrome reproductions, he reasoned, imagine the effect of faithful, full-scale, full-color copies: works that would give audiences outside Spain their first real encounter with Velázquez's complete oeuvre.

The practical reality of the project was daunting. Moya was committed to reproducing each of the forty-one Velázquez paintings in the Prado Museum at its original dimensions. He also committed to grinding the pigments himself and mixing them according to seventeenth-century specifications. He spent two years studying Velázquez's technique before beginning the copies in November 1921.

Moya del Pino in his studio with some of the Velázquez paintings he had been copying.

Four Years in the Prado

He completed seven of the smaller paintings in the first two months alone, then progressed through increasingly ambitious works: Los Borrachos (The Triumph of Bacchus), Las Hilanderas (The Spinners), Las Lanzas (The Surrender of Breda), and finally Las Meninas itself (The Maids of Honor). Las Meninas measures nearly 94 square feet (over 10 ft. wide). Moya copied it at actual size.

What this required was not mechanical reproduction but reverse-engineering. Velázquez built his figures from darkness outward, beginning with shadow tones and working toward lights, reversing the conventional academic method. To replicate this meant working out, from the evidence of the paint itself, the sequence of decisions that had produced it. Four years of this left a permanent mark on Moya's own painting, visible in the way he constructed a face, built an atmosphere, let a background breathe — even later in his life.

Moya del Pino in the Prado Museum copying "Las Meninas"

Wide-spread support

The project attracted powerful supporters. The Duke of Berwick and Alba, a well-known patron of the arts, presented the idea to Alfonso XIII, King of Spain, who embraced the thought of taking all these masterpieces on a traveling show to other countries. In recent years travel to Spain had plummeted due to the 1918 influenza pandemic that many foreigners thought had started in that country (many called it the “Spanish flu”);* the King, hoping to revive the economy, had become a great promoter of tourism, and a “cultural mission” to introduce other nations to Spain’s artistic masterpieces seemed like a worthwhile effort to help foster travel to the country.

The Duke of Berwick and Alba became honorary president of the company that was formed to manage the exhibition. King Alfonso XIII gave it his official patronage. Moya del Pino was its director, and his friend the sculptor Francisco Moré de la Torre also collaborated on the venture.

The sheer scale of what Moya undertook in the Prado between November 1921 and early 1925 is worth dwelling on. Forty-two paintings. Actual scale. Historical pigments. Four years of daily work in a public museum, before the originals, with the Prado's directors monitoring the quality of each copy and confirming it matched the originals in size and detail. This is not a project that could have been undertaken by someone who was merely technically accomplished. It required a kind of obsessive concentration, an ability to look at the same paintings and to maintain that level of attention, every day, for months at a time.

Moya later described the experience in terms that suggest it was as much a philosophical as a technical education.** In his view, Velázquez’s apparent simplicity concealed a profound understanding of nature and the essential qualities of what he saw. His paintings seemed to emerge effortlessly, with forms reduced to their essentials and details sometimes barely suggested, yet the result possessed extraordinary vitality and presence. For Moya, technique was not simply a matter of manual skill but the definitive expression of the painter’s vision.

A Celebration before the Journey

In October 1924, when most of the 42 copies were ready (the 41 paintings exhibited in the Prado Museum plus Velázquez's self-portrait that he had to travel to Valencia to copy), a banquet in Moya del Pino’s honor was held at the Ritz Hotel. It was attended by fifty-two of the leading figures in Spanish cultural life — royalty, aristocrats, writers, painters — gathered to toast a project they believed would carry Spain's greatest artistic heritage to the Americas. From the distance of a century the banquet, the speeches, the toasts, read with the poignancy of people who did not yet know what was about to happen. The project was real. The achievement was real. The failure that followed was equally real. But on that October night in 1924, everything seemed possible.

Less than 10 months later, that project would be financially ruined on the other side of the world. But at that moment everything was poised for greatness. The 42 painstakingly executed copies stood on the brink of their journey across the Atlantic—a remarkable feat of artistic dedication on the verge of an outcome no one at that celebration could have foreseen. What happened next is a story for the following post.

In October of 1924 the Velázquez copies (excluding the two that Moya painted in early 1925) were exhibited at the Palacio del Retiro as part of the Madrid Autumn Salon.

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To see some of José Moya del Pino’s copies of Velázquez, see the Velázquez section of the Catalog of Works on this website. (Few images of the actual paintings exist, as the current location of most of them is unknown; most of the images in that section were scanned from the black & white "Exhibiciones Velázquez" program.)

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* The 1918 influenza was called by many “the Spanish flu,” though its origins are unclear. Many countries during World War I censured their communications, while Spain, who remained neutral, shared information more freely and therefore appeared more hardly hit than other countries. King Alfonso XIII himself fell gravely ill, and his illness was widely reported, contributing to the impression that Spain was the most affected area.

** J. Moya del Pino. The Universality of Velázquez. Philadelphia Forum magazine, April 1925.