Zurbarán at the National Gallery Reveals a Wider, Stranger Range
Francisco de Zurbarán’s reputation has long rested on his severe, meditative saints. A new exhibition at the National Gallery in London, opening May 2 and running through August 23, 2026, argues that the Spanish Baroque painter (1598-1664) was far more varied — and, in some respects, more experimental — than that familiar image suggests.
The survey, the first on this scale since 1987, brings together the artist’s signature religious figures with intimate still lifes, late devotional paintings, and major commissions made for confraternities in Seville and across Andalucía. Curator Daniel Sobrino Ralston says the exhibition is designed to show how Zurbarán moved between private devotion and monumental public display without losing the precision that defines his work.
Among the most closely watched additions are two newly discovered paintings, including “Alcarraza on a Plate” (around 1650 or earlier). The works depict ceramic objects that also appear in “Still Life with Four Vessels” (around 1650), a version of which, on loan from the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, will be shown in London. Ralston suggests the new attributions may illuminate Zurbarán’s working method, and possibly that of his son Juan, by showing how small, detailed studies could be translated into larger compositions at the same scale.
That attention to scale becomes especially vivid in the exhibition’s reconstruction of part of an altarpiece from the Charterhouse of Jerez de la Frontera. The original ensemble would have stood about 15 meters tall. For the first time in roughly 175 years, the second tier will be reassembled through loans of “The Adoration of the Magi” (1638-39) and “The Circumcision” (1639) from the Musée de Grenoble, together with “Virgin of the Rosary with the Carthusians” (1638-39) from the National Museum in Poznań. The result should give visitors a rare sense of how overwhelming these works would have been inside a church.
The exhibition also revisits Zurbarán’s late period, which has often been treated as a decline after the forceful paintings of the 1630s and the devastation of Seville’s 1649 plague, which killed Juan. Ralston argues instead that the artist changed direction, producing smaller, softer works intended for houses and private chapels. In that context, “The Veil of Veronica” (1658) stands out for its cartellino, a painted scrap of paper announcing authorship, and for its subtle play between illusion and devotion.
The final work in the exhibition, “Crucified Christ with a Painter,” extends that inquiry into authorship and image-making. Whether read as a self-portrait or as Saint Luke bearing the painter’s likeness, it suggests an artist thinking carefully about what painting can claim to do. Seen together, the works make a persuasive case that Zurbarán’s art was never as narrow as his reputation implies.
