Why the British have been obsessed with Spain for 400 years

When Samuel Pepys went into detail in his diaries about his fumblings and fondlings he used snatches of Spanish to describe his attempts to hazer la grande cosa. I think it was out of reluctance to put it in plain English as much as to hide the facts from prying eyes.

Pepys (1633-1703) was exceptional in his love for things Spanish. Despite the popularity of Don Quixote, regarded as a comic novel, most English people at the time thought of the Spanish as proud, papistical and persecuted by the Inquisition.
For Pepys, who actually visited Spain once, the land chiefly meant music and theatre. Early in 1660 he met Henry Purcell’s father by chance in a coffee house. With another musician they enjoyed themselves for an hour or so after dinner performing a variety of “brave Italian and Spanish songs”.

A Spanish play translated into English as The Adventure of Five Hours became an enthusiasm of Pepys’s in 1666. He bought the text after seeing a performance and enjoyed the complex plot more each time he read it. This led him into a judgment that has attracted some merriment at his expense. “To Deptford by water, reading Othello, Moor of Venice, which I ever heretofore esteemed a mighty good play, but having so lately read The Adventures of Five Houres it seems a mean thing.”

Of course, Spain and England go back a long way, their royal families often intermarrying. With the marriage of Katherine of Aragon to Henry VIII in 1509, the Spanish bride had, according to Clarissa Dickson Wright’s History of English Food, set a fashion for sack, sallets and sweet potato. The salad days of wine and taters hardly outlived the discarded queen, and then came the Armada.

Even after that, the future Charles I went, notionally incognito, to Madrid in 1623 to woo Philip IV’s daughter. He failed, but while there was painted by Velázquez. The picture has been lost, yet the British continued to admire the painter, while lapping up at the same time the spine-chilling Black Legend of Spain. A classic case was their attitude to the Escorial.
A lovely renaissance palace and monastery in a beautiful mountain setting north-west of Madrid, it acquired the image of a monstrous house of horrors, the dark labyrinth of the mad monk-king Philip II. Even the well-informed Richard Ford in the 1840s was prepared to find the very architecture guilty of superstition, declaring the gridiron plan, in honour of the instrument of the martyrdom of its patron St Lawrence, evidence of Philip’s bigotry.

“It is so utterly dreary and so hopelessly fatiguing a sight,” wrote Augustus Hare in 1873, in his Wanderings in Spain, “that it requires the utmost Christian patience to endure it.” He characterised it as bleak, ghastly, dismal, prison-like, harsh, hideous, bare, gloomy, cold, oppressive.

His language was copied directly from Théophile Gautier’s own Wanderings in Spain, which declared 20 years earlier: “Very few persons return from the Escurial; they either die of consumption in two or three days, or blow out their brains – that is, if they are Englishmen.”

Even hostile trips to Spain remained a rarity compared with visits to France and Italy on the Grand Tour. An explosion of British tourism by the elite didn’t take place until the first half of the 19th century. The Spain that visitors now sought was one of dashing Andalucians, Moorish orange groves and dark-eyed beauties, a fantasy cemented in the anglophone mind by the American Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra (1832).

This was the Spain that Richard Ford had come to see in 1830, staying in Seville and Granada for three years and making excursions of hundreds of miles by horse. With his Handbook for Spain (1845), regarded by some as the greatest guide book ever written, Ford fed the appetite of English tourists, the “curiosos impertinentes” in Cervantes’ phrase, who walked for pleasure, clambered about castles, penetrated palaces and poked about in sacristies in pursuit of the picturesque and artistic.

For the English who could not visit the Alhambra, the Alhambra came to Sydenham in 1854. The construction in suburbia of the Alhambra Court for the Crystal Palace, after its move from Hyde Park, was the work of Owen Jones, the great designer. His facsimile of the fountain in the Alhambra’s Court of the Lions – with water splashing into the wide basin supported on the backs of 12 archaic lions – was characterised by dazzling colours. Although the pillars of the real thing in Granada are plain marble, Owen had his gilded, convinced that this was their original state.

He also constructed a kind of dome with stalactite geometric pendants called muqarnas, originally made by Moorish architects building up prisms of plaster, one by one, into intricate patterns. Jones found it saved time to produce sections from moulds formed with gelatine. “It is difficult to conceive to what extent the Moors would have been led by their vivid imaginations,” he wrote, “had they been acquainted with gelatine moulds.”

Venturing into Spain, even with the coming of the railways, was still only for the intrepid. In 1866, Lady Herbert of Lea, travelling for her health, was enjoying the view from her railway carriage when “suddenly the train came to a standstill: an enormous fragment of rock had fallen across the line in the night, burying the luggage train. Our party had no alternative but to get out, with our manifold bags and packages, and walk across the debris to another train, which, fortunately, was waiting on the opposite side of the chasm.” She soon learnt “to expect such incidents half a dozen times in the course of a day’s journey”.

One adventurous Englishman abroad, quite unaware of his own comic behaviour, was J S Campion, author of On Foot in Spain (1879). Wearing a canvas “carryall” of his own devising, containing many pockets, he set off to walk from the Bay of Biscay to the Mediterranean. In his pockets Campion stowed a couple of pairs of socks, half a dozen handkerchiefs, a change of underclothes, some paper collars and cuffs (to “put on airs”), a comb, a toothbrush, a towel and piece of soap, pencils, a writing case, sewing materials, smoking equipment, a Foreign Office passport, a flask of gunpowder, a pouch of shot, a wrench, a screwdriver, oh, and a map of northern Spain. Over the lot went an old greatcoat and a soft felt hat, although the weather hovered between 24 C and 27 C.

He found no pleasure in religious art. Of a carving of the Last Judgment at Tudela, he wrote: “Sufficient to say, indecency bordering on insanity is there revealed in stone.” More to his taste were the locks on the canal at Zaragoza and the artificial guano factory.

If visual art was not for Campion, the 19th century saw a wholesale importation of Spanish Old Masters into Britain. Richard Ford was a connoisseur of paintings by inheritance and disposition. Among the pictures he brought back from Spain was Zurbarán’s astounding Saint Serapion, which would eventually make a splash in London in 2009 at the National Gallery exhibition The Sacred Made Real.

Before his Handbook became a bestseller, Ford had written on Velázquez and “discovered” his sole surviving nude, the Rokeby Venus, named after the house in County Durham where it was hung after being bought in 1814 for £500. In 1906, Edward VII gave £8,000 towards its acquisition by the National Gallery.

Steam (ships and trains) made it practicable for British artists to journey to see Spanish works of art for themselves. Velázquez became a touchstone for painters such as Whistler and Sargent (if they can be called British). In 1874, Whistler made a sensation exhibiting his own pictures in a gallery in Pall Mall and was likened to the Spanish master. “Why drag in Velázquez?” he joked.

Whistler’s last self-portrait, Brown and Gold (1898), by which he wished to be remembered, was closely based on Velázquez’s portrait of Pablo de Valladolid, a court jester, which hung in the Prado as it does now. Whistler had first fed on Spanish art, outside photographs, at the blockbuster to end all blockbusters – the Art Treasures of Great Britain exhibition, held in 1857 in Manchester, where 16,000 works were seen by 1.3 million people, four times the population of the city.

Sargent (born of American parents in Florence) went to Spain at least seven times, first visiting the Prado to see canvasses by Velázquez in 1879, aged 23. The painter with whom he had trained in Paris insisted: “Velázquez, Velázquez, Velázquez, ceaselessly study Velázquez.” He did.

In Spain Sargent met Joaquin Sorolla, seven years younger than him, a Valencian who himself visited the Prado as an 18-year-old in 1881. In 2006 a double exhibition, Sargent and Sorolla, was to celebrate their common inheritance from Velázquez as painters of light. (Yet, what painter is not a painter of light?) In 1903 Sorolla gave to Sargent a study for his large and successful oil Triste Herencia (Sad Inheritance), showing disabled boys bathing in the sea.

But when the National Gallery in London mounted an exhibition of 58 of Sorolla’s paintings in 2019, it called him “a name few know in the UK”, perhaps because not many Sorolla’s are on show in Britain. Even British people who frequented the Prado would find only in an obscure corner a great painting by Sorolla like And They Still Say Fish Is Expensive! (¡Aún dicen que el pescado es caro!, 1894) on the other side of the downstairs lavatories from the entertaining but weird Queen Joanna the Mad (Doña Juana la Loca, 1877), by Francisco Pradilla (which shows the Spanish queen in 1506 carting the body of her dead husband across a blasted heath).

In London, Sorolla had been better known in 1908 than in 2019. In the former year the Grafton Galleries in Mayfair put on a three-month exhibition. It was quite a show, with 278 exhibits including And They Still Say Fish Is Expensive! (displayed under the title The Wounded Fisherman), as well as large canvasses full of light such as Beaching the Boat at Valencia, with oxen pulling up the craft through the breakers as the sun catches its sail. What gallery-goers made of the blurry monochrome reproductions in the catalogue is hard to say. The defining coloration of Sorolla was all lost, but the world was accustomed then to viewing art reduced to black and white.

Archer Milton Huntington, the adopted son of a railroad magnate, saw the exhibition, was impressed, bought two paintings and eventually commissioned Sorolla to paint a vast series of murals for the Hispanic Society of America, in New York.
That is another story, but though it seemed good fortune, I think it was a disaster, for it tied up and exhausted Sorolla from 1912 to 1919 in an enterprise that posthumously resembled superficially the sort of national vision favoured by the Franco regime, which poisoned the wells of traditional Spanish culture. If London hadn’t taken the painter to its heart, the disastrous turn in Sorolla’s life would never have happened.

Francoism came to replace the Black Legend as a reason to hate Spanish culture in British eyes. The forthcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy will give us an opportunity to distinguish the genuinely fascist from the bright depiction of Spanish traditions.

Spain and the Hispanic World is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London W1 (royalacademy.org.uk), from Jan 21 to Apr 10