Prado Museum

The long facade with the columns of the central portico belongs to a building that was never intended for paintings. The plan was to house a cabinet of natural history here, beside the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid and the observatory then under construction, bringing together plants, minerals, animals, and observations of the sky in one quarter. The natural-history collections never moved into these rooms. Later, the former cabinet was filled with canvases from the royal residences.

Inside the Prado Museum is a formal portrait of Queen María Isabel of Braganza. She points to plans of the museum galleries, and this facade is visible behind her. The portrait was painted posthumously: the woman depicted as the museum’s founder did not live to see its opening.

The building was intended for a different collection. In seventeen eighty-five, Charles III commissioned the architect Juan de Villanueva to build the Cabinet of Natural History here. The Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid was already nearby, and an observatory was being built farther on: plants, minerals, animals, and astronomical observations were meant to form a single scientific quarter. In March eighteen oh eight, the nearly completed rooms were occupied by French cavalry. After the war, the natural-history collections were never transferred here.

The new purpose was proposed by María Isabel, the second wife of Ferdinand VII, who had returned to the Spanish throne. She painted, was an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and worked to have paintings from the royal palaces displayed in the empty building. Ferdinand agreed to establish the Royal Museum of Painting and Sculpture.

María Isabel had very little time. At court, the twenty-year-old queen was expected to produce an heir. Her first daughter lived for less than five months. At the end of eighteen eighteen, María Isabel died during her second childbirth, together with the newborn girl. Ferdinand continued the work on the future museum.

On November nineteenth, eighteen nineteen, three rooms containing three hundred eleven paintings by Spanish masters were opened to visitors. More than one and a half thousand works from the royal residences were already in the building. This origin explains the makeup of the Prado Museum: the core of its collection consists of works that Spanish monarchs commissioned, bought, and kept at court. Only in eighteen sixty-nine did the museum, together with its collection, pass from the crown to the state.

The modern name was adopted in nineteen twenty. “Prado” means “meadow” and preserves the memory of Prado de los Jerónimos—the meadows near the Monastery of Saint Jerome, where the science cabinet was built. Inside the former Cabinet now hangs the posthumous portrait of María Isabel: the queen points to the museum galleries, which opened eleven months after her death.