The Royal Scottish Academy’s summer exhibition, “The Discovery of Spain”, is an episodic history of an uneasy relationship. The show tells the story of how British artists and British collectors have explored the culture, the landscape and the artistic traditions of Spain during the last two centuries. The approach is necessarily partial, with the emphasis falling on particular moments of contact and exchange. The exhibition is bracketed by two great conflicts. It begins with the Peninsular War and ends, more than a hundred and twenty years later, with the Spanish Civil War.

In the opening gallery, Goya comes face to face with the Duke of Wellington. The date is 1812 and Wellington has just fought the Battle of Saragossa to liberate Spain from Napoleon’s occupying army. In a quiet, darkened room Goya is painting his portrait. The painter hardly bothers with the trappings of rank, dulling the soldier’s scarlet uniform to a deep blood-red and rendering the medals on his chest as unfocussed dabs of glitter. The face is all. Goya sees Wellington as a wan and hollow-cheeked ghost with a lost and lonely look in his eyes. Wellington was no doubt exhausted by his Spanish campaigns, but Goya surely projected some of his own vast disillusionment into the eyes of his sitter.

Nearby hang some prints from The Disasters of War, Goya’s darkest musings. Created just a few years earlier, these small images of appalling atrocity were inspired by the harsh realities of the Peninsular War in its first and bloodiest phase. They show the amputated limbs of victims nailed to a tree as a warning to others; the bolt-upright body of a garrotted man, preserved in his death throes; a corpse being sliced into pieces by soldiers, like the carcass of an animal in a butcher’s shop.

By 1827, Goya was on his way out of Spain and into France, a self-imposed exile. He had less than a year to live. As he left the country via the small French town of Bayonne he was passed by an English painter coming in the other direction. J.M.W. Turner’s best friend, David Wilkie, had decided to visit Spain and paint some pictures inspired by its recent history. For centuries, Spain had barely impinged on the British consciousness, existing more as a set of xenophobic stereotypes than as an actual place. It had stood for Catholic superstition, for unlettered ignorance and the misuse of royal and ecclesiastical power. As a result of the alliance forged during the Peninsular War, British interest in Spain suddenly intensified. It remained, however, deeply coloured by myth and wishful thinking.

Like Goya before him, Wilkie chose to paint scenes from the Peninsular War. But he bowdlerised the conflict for the consumption of the conservative market back in England. The true horrors of battle found no place on canvases such as his The Defence of Zaragoza, a saccharine retelling of the tale of the so-called “Maid of Zaragoza”, a heroine of the conflict who had entered folklore for her exploits. In Wilkie’s painting she is a limp-wristed and ever-so-English-looking maid, firing a cannon towards the enemy’s positions. A priest holding a crucifix directs operations, as if to underline that these Spanish insurgents are no revolutionaries-in-waiting, but god-fearing pillars of the state who will return to normal life with exemplary docility the moment the war has ended. King George IV was sufficiently reassured by Wilkie’s distortions of history to buy all four of the resulting pictures.



Wilkie was followed to Spain by several generations of later British painters, keen to inject a touch of hispanic exoticism into their work. The scenographer and topographical artist, David Roberts, was enthralled by the theatricality of Spanish church interiors, responding at once to the density of their decoration and the rich colours of their polychrome statuary. It seemed, to him, as if he had discovered a Catholic aesthetic so alien and unique that it pushed towards the horror vacui of Islamic religious decoration. For his part, Owen Jones, the immensely influential student of decoration, discovered and popularised the actual vocabulary of Spanish Moorish architecture when he travelled to Granada and produced drawing after drawing of the interiors of the Alhambra.

The Scots painter John Philip painted lucrative potboilers inspired by the seeming exoticism of Spanish social customs. ‘La Gloria’: A Spanish Wake, of 1864, is a characteristically flamboyant example of his work, contrasting the death of a young boy and the sadness of his mother with the paroxysmal festival taking place outside in celebration of the child’s immortal soul. In pictures such as these, it is not hard to sense the origins of Spain’s popularity as a tourist destination among men and women from the dour, cold Protestant North. Phillip was from Aberdeen, and his smaller oil studies and watercolours of the ordinary Spanish scene are beautiful images of heatstruck and colour-saturated backstreets. They are far slighter than his full-blown moneyspinners, but none the worse for that – shot through with the painter’s delighted surprise at his discovery of a new world.

The exhibition also explores the growing British taste for collecting Spanish works of art, exemplified by a kind of Greatest Hits gallery filled with masterpieces by Velazquez, Zurbaran, El Greco, Murillo and other Spanish masters, all acquired by British individuals or institutions during the past 200 years. It winds to its conclusion with two more rooms devoted primarily to the art of British painters in Spain. Here there are some incandescent pictures of Rhonda and Toledo in the 1930s by David Bomberg, as well as a remarkable series of paintings by the most intriguing and original of the Glasgow Boys, Arthur Melville. The very final section is given over to some disappointingly lightweight images of the Spanish Civil War by artists such as Edward Burra, Wyndham Lewis and Henry Moore. The selection could almost have been planned to substantiate George Orwell’s attack on the “soft-boiled” English intellectuals who failed to understand Spain in its agony. At the last, it is redeemed by the presence of Picasso’s savage sunburst of grief, The Weeping Woman, and the even more sombre print that was inspired by it. These are works of art which look back towards Goya, and confirm that the Spanish painted their own wars better than anyone else.