Charlotte Bracegirdle and Las Meninas
‘Life is an individual experience, in which we become somebody for just a moment; to live and to enjoy our dreams, leaving inevitably a trace behind us.’
Charlotte Bracegirdle’s work is based around the subtle traces that we leave behind. When a person no longer occupies a space everything appears different, but visually nothing is altered. Everything looks, smells and feels as it was when that person was there, but the image is not the same despite evidence telling you that it is. The pictures become empty stages, deserted and uncanny – left only with hints of past activity. Although there are just the empty spaces, surreal shapes and objects floating, at a closer glance you’ll see shadows where once were people.
Charlotte’s most recent work A Room In The Palace is painted upon a bought canvas of Las Meninas a 1656 painting by Diego Velázquez, the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age, in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. The work’s complex and enigmatic composition raises questions about reality and illusion, and creates an uncertain relationship between the viewer and the figures depicted. Because of these complexities, Las Meninas has been one of the most widely analysed works in Western painting.
The painting shows a large room in the Madrid palace of King Philip IV of Spain, and presents several figures, most identifiable from the Spanish court, captured, according to some commentators, in a particular moment as if in a snapshot. Some look out of the canvas towards the viewer, while others interact among themselves. The young Infanta Margarita is surrounded by her entourage of maids of honour, chaperone, bodyguard, two dwarfs and a dog. Just behind them, Velázquez portrays himself working at a large canvas. Velázquez looks outwards, beyond the pictorial space to where a viewer of the painting would stand. A mirror hangs in the background and reflects the upper bodies of the king and queen. The royal couple appear to be placed outside the picture space in a position similar to that of the viewer, although some scholars have speculated that their image is a reflection from the painting Velázquez is shown working on.
Las Meninas has long been recognised as one of the most important paintings in Western art history. The Baroque painter Luca Giordano said that it represents the “theology of painting”, while in the 19th century Sir Thomas Lawrence called the work “the philosophy of art”. More recently, it has been described as “Velázquez’s supreme achievement, a highly self-conscious, calculated demonstration of what painting could achieve, and perhaps the most searching comment ever made on the possibilities of the easel painting”.
Charlotte is not the only person however to be fascinated with Las Meninas as Pablo Picasso has also been moved enough by the original painting to create his own version.
From the time of his adolescence, Picasso adored Velázquez, whom he copied at the Prado Museum. A few months after seeing Las Meninas at the age of fourteen, his seven-year old blond sister María de la Concepción died from diphtheria. Picasso and his family (especially his father) never really recovered from their loss. This loss would follow Picasso for the rest of his life. In 1897, at the age of 16 – less than a year after the death of his sister, he produced his first sketch concerning Las Meninas characters – María Agustina (the head maid) and María Margarita (the infanta). It is no coincidence that both the infanta and his sister were blond.
Between August and December in 1957 Picasso shut himself in the studio of his house, La Californie near Cannes, to face the challenge of Las Meninas. One unique piece of work is the origin of fifty-eight oil paintings: forty-four inspired in the model, nine little pigeons, three landscapes and two free interpretations. A whole series in which he plays with exterior and pictorial reality, art and life, to include views from the exterior into the series of paintings.
After he completed the first and most widely recognized variation of Las Meninas Picasso turned his gaze towards María Margarita, the infanta. This fixation was not chosen lightly. The age of seventy-five was a symbolically important one for Picasso because Picasso’s father had died at the age of seventy-five. This period of Picasso´s life brought back visions of his own mortality, which inevitably evoked memories of his sister´s death. By looking at the Velázquez variations of the late 1950s, the imagery of his young blond sister is clearly contained within the imagery of the blond infanta.
To buy Charlotte Bracegirdle’s own version of Las Meninas – A Room in the Palace click here >