Passionate historian of Spanish art and culture

Gold medal in Fine Arts, member of the Academy of San Fernando and Grand Cross of Alfonso X el Sabio, the North American professor was fascinated by Velázquez from his youth

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Jonathan Brown era Professor of Fine Arts at New York University and one of the most important specialists in the pictorial art of the Spanish Golden Age. His passion for art and the history of our country was born in him when he came to Madrid for a year as a student and discovered at the Prado Museum Las Meninas; since then he knew that would dedicate his entire life to Hispanic culture and painting, especially Velázquez.

In the Sevillian painter, Jonathan Brown discovered the greatest innovator of painting, with his extremely complex and inimitable pictorial technique. And so he will always teach it with his academic rigor and elegant prose.

His study of Spanish art is so decisive that he has changed approach and historical understanding that was had of the house of the Austria and the first Bourbons, helping to study them as sovereigns with a broader vision than was believed. In fact, his enormous academic work will help bring our History and our art out of isolation and reintroduce them into the mainstream of Western culture.

The last years of his life, Jonathan Brown had been determined to make known the despised colonial painting; he curated exhibitions of Hispanic-American artists and the first major exhibition of Goya in his country, while he directed a multitude of doctoral theses to students who had been infected with his passion for Spanish art and who, in his opinion, was not sufficiently known or valued in historiography.

Jonathan Brown holds the Gold Medal for Fine Arts, is a corresponding member of the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts and in 1996 received the Grand Cross of Alfonso X El Sabio and the Bernardo de Gálvez award for his passionate dedication to teaching our art and our history.

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