Prado Reinstates Aparicio's 'Famine' After 150 Years
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- The Prado selected Aparicio's 1818 'The Year of the Famine in Madrid' as the inaugural work in its new 'A Work, a Story' series, marking the canvas's return after more than 150 years of exile across a government ministry, the senate and another Madrid museum.
- Aparicio's painting was the museum's must-see in its early decades, outdrawing Raphael and Velázquez's Las Meninas, before being banished in 1874 under director Antonio Gisbert Pérez, whose own work 'The Execution of Torrijos' honoured a general who fought Ferdinand's rule.
- The canvas depicts emaciated Madrileños refusing bread from French occupiers, with the propagandistic motto 'Nada sin Fernando' ('Nothing without Ferdinand') inscribed on a background pillar to cement the restored king's image.
- Aparicio's reputation collapsed so far that an 1879 book cited preference for the painting as a marker of being 'tacky,' curator Carlos G Navarro noted, with Goya's civilian-suffering works eventually eclipsing Aparicio as the era's defining artistic testimony.
- Curators Celia Guilarte Calderón de la Barca and Navarro stress the painting was once considered 'more modern' than Goya, and that the new series aims to show how taste, politics and context shift with each generation — not to rehabilitate Aparicio's standing.
- Director Miguel Falomir said the series aims to 'encourage the viewer to look at a work which, aside from its aesthetic merits, helps us to reflect on aspects of art history that often go unnoticed.'
Why it matters: The Prado is using Aparicio's whiplash trajectory — from must-see Ferdinand VII propaganda to a 19th-century punchline — to argue that canonical art history is far more politically contingent than visitors assume, with curators explicitly linking his fall to Spain's mid-century political shifts.
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