Juan de Valdés Leal

Valdés Niza Leal, Juan de
Nisa y Leal Valdés, Juan de

Spanish, 1622 - 1690

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Spanish artist (1622-1690)

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A young woman wearing a white robe and teal-blue cape is held aloft on the shoulders of three floating angels, surrounded by clouds crowded with cherubs above a group of people looking up from below in this vertical painting. All the people have light skin. The woman, Mary, lifts her arms, palms open. Her pink lips are parted, and her brown eyes look up toward light shining through a patch of blue sky from the top left corner of the painting. Her white robe has voluminous, long sleeves and is belted and tied with a strip of cloth. A gold clasp secures her cape, which is rimmed at the neck with gold. Her long, blond hair and her cape swirl around her. Above her, in the top right corner, four winged faces with round, chubby cheeks and tousled hair look around the scene. Other winged angels are faintly outlined in a coral-pink cluster in the white clouds beyond the woman. One of these angels strums the strings of a harp. The sky around them swirls with patches of hazy of sapphire and celestial blue mixed with wispy, white clouds. Three winged angels support Mary’s legs with their arms intertwined. The angels have chin-length, wavy blond hair and they wear robes in rose pink, mint, or moss green. Their hair and drapery flutters as if in a breeze as they look down onto the crowd of people below. In the lower right corner and closest to us, a balding man with a gray beard and hair is shown from about the waist up, facing away from us. He wears a dark blue robe with mustard-brown fabric draped over his left elbow and across his back. He looks up at Mary with his right hand raised to shield his eyes. He reaches down with his left hand to touch a book on a brown rock beside him. A slip of paper under the book reads, “BALDSLEA,” with the “BAL” intertwined as a monogram. Just beyond him to our right, a young woman with long, curly brown hair clutches her breast as she stares up. Beyond this pair, a group of people robed in muted pastel yellow, green, blue, or pink, gather around a white stone box, a tomb. On the side of the tomb facing us, a sculpted frieze shows a child-like cherub among stylized waves and swirls. To our left, two bearded men stand looking at the people leaning over and gathered near the tomb. The man closer to us gestures with his left hand and holds a large book or tablet tucked along his right side. The head of a third man, white-bearded and stooped, appears behind them. The scene is loosely painted so some details are indistinct, especially in the group gathered around the tomb and the onlookers below.
Juan de Valdés Leal, The Assumption of the Virgin, c. 1658/1660, oil on canvas, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1961.9.46

The Assumption of the Virgin

Juan de Valdés Leal · c. 1658/1660 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1961.9.46

Bibliography

1960

  • Trapier, Elizabeth Du Gué. Valdés Leal: Spanish Baroque Painter. New York, 1960.

1978

  • Kinkead, Duncan T. Juan de Valdés Leal (1622-1690): His Life and Work. London and New York, 1978.

1988

  • Valdivieso, Enrique. Juan de Valdés Leal. Seville, 1988.

1990

  • Brown, Jonathan, and Richard G. Mann. Spanish Paintings of the Fifteenth through Nineteenth Centuries. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1990: 112.