Spanish gallery

The Spanish gallery, also called Spanish museum was a gallery of Spanish painting created by French King Louis Philippe I in 1838, shown in the Louvre, then dismantled in 1853.

Until the French Revolution, Spanish art was seldom shown or known in France. it appeared at the Louvre with the Napoleonic Wars and the looting politics of Vivant Denon. However, stolen art pieces were given back by France after the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815).

Louis Philippe decided in 1835 to found a Spanish painting gallery in the Louvre. He had several motivations:

Beginning in 1810, French occupation and repression in Spain made it highly unstable. The secularization of religious orders facilitated the selling of their art pieces outside of the Spanish territory.

In 1835, he founded an "artistic mission" directed by Baron Isidore Taylor, which was in charge of constituting quickly a vast collection of Spanish paintings. Taylor acquired a huge collection of hundreds of paintings from primitive paintings to the Spanish Golden Age. Many of the paintings he acquired were unknown from the public because they came from religious collections.

The "Spanish Gallery" opened to the public on 7 January 1838, accompanied by a lot of Royal marketing and publicity. Louis Philippe stressed the point that the collection was acquired on his own founds. The collection counted for example 81 Zurbaran, 39 Murillo, 28 Ribera, 23 Cano, and 19 Velázquez. Many paintings attracted the admiration of the public.

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