Portrait du sculpteur Martínez Montañés (Velázquez)

Overview

The Portrait of the sculptor Juan Martínez Montañés (c. 1635-36) by Diego Velázquez shows the Seville sculptor (1568-1649) in black, his sculpting hand held out in front of the half-finished clay head of Philip IV he was modelling at the time (Velázquez painted it while the sculptor was in Madrid for that commission). It is in the Museo del Prado, Madrid. (Sources: Museo del Prado; Commons description of the Prado file; the sitter and subject are well established, the date varies slightly between catalogues.)

Marie and this painting

Identification. Marie does not name the sitter. On 4 October 1881, in the Prado, she writes of « le portrait d'un sculpteur inconnu » in which « il y a une main qui est la clef de toute l'exécution de Carolus-Duran qui comme on sait veut rééditer Vélasquez » (093.0179). On 6 October 1881 she writes that she has « copié la main de Vélasquez » (093.0189), working « bien modestement en noir et en mantille comme toutes les femmes ici ». The « portrait d'un sculpteur inconnu » is identified here with the Prado's Montañés portrait, whose most conspicuous feature is the sculptor's hand; this is an inference by the editors, not stated in the diary.

On 18 September 1882 she describes the stairway and anteroom of the studio of her master Tony Robert-Fleury (the context is the portrait he is painting of her), hung with photographs of old masters: on the landing one sees the Gioconda and « le portrait du sculpteur de Vélasquez » (096.0257). So a photograph of this painting hung in Tony's studio, a few months after her own copying in Madrid.

Related

La Forge de Vulcain (Velázquez) (the other Prado picture she copied), the person entry Velasquez (a stub filed under people/mentioned; this work entry supersedes none of it, but both should be cross-linked), Carolus-Duran, Madrid.