Image: Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona
Catalonia’s Department of Culture has incorporated two paintings into the National Collection through a tax-payment arrangement: a still life by Juan de Zurbarán and a self-portrait by Anton Raphael Mengs. The Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya selected and studied both works before proposing their inclusion for their quality, singularity and capacity to enrich the national collections. The transfer received a favourable report from Catalonia’s Junta de Qualificació, Valoració i Exportació de Béns del Patrimoni Cultural, which advises on the protection and promotion of movable cultural heritage and participates in cultural-property acquisition procedures.
The paintings came from the Bertran family collection, a Catalan private collection specializing in Hispanic art and European Baroque art that was formed over several generations. The Zurbarán still life had previously belonged to Francesc Cambó, who gave it to his lawyer Josep Bertran i Musitu in gratitude for his services.
Painted by Zurbarán in 1640, ‘Bodegó del molinet de xocolata’ is distinguished by its unusually depicted chocolate mill, which provides information about everyday customs, objects and material culture in the Hispanic Baroque. The acquisition significantly strengthens the national collections’ representation of Zurbarán, a prominent seventeenth-century Seville still-life painter whose known catalogue is small.
Mengs had a decisive influence on eighteenth-century academic art and excelled particularly in self-portraiture. The self-portrait was included in a monographic exhibition devoted to Mengs at the Museo Nacional del Prado from November 2025 to March 2026.
Together, the two paintings add substantially to the MNAC’s Renaissance and Baroque holdings and reinforce its representation of two important figures in European art history.
