Juan Sanchez Cotan

Bio

It is now nearly four hundred years since Juan Sánchez Cotán painted what are among the first, and surely among the greatest, still lifes by any European artist. Yet the general understanding of these stunningly inventive, even mesmerising works is still too often clouded by the lingering nineteenth-century misconception that they were painted by a cloistered monk as objects of religious meditation. This distortion of historical fact common in the older literature, and even in some of the new – clouds perception of their true significance as unsurpassed achievements of early naturalism, complex in its origins, and the logical, if at first surprising, outgrowth of the most sophisticated artistic centre in Spain at the time, the Toledo of El Greco.

Sánchez Cotán was forty-three years old when, in 1603, he decided to close his workshop in Toledo and move to Granada to spend what remained of his life as a lay brother in the Carthusian Order, not an uncommon course at the time. Although as a lay brother he took the same vows as any Carthusian, he never became a cloistered monk and was free to leave the monastery whenever he liked. By 1603, at an age when many of his contemporaries had already died, his successful practice as a painter had been in most respects a conventional one. The single exception was that, like certain late-sixteenth-century painters in humanist circles in Italy and northern Europe, he had been experimenting with the revival of the ancient art form of the still life. At the time of his retirement, an inventory of his studio was drawn up; it included about sixty paintings: roughly half were religious subjects (mostly devotional images of the Virgin and saints); many were portraits (including several of aristocrats and one of a famous bearded lady); two were erotic mythologies; and twelve were either finished or unfinished still lifes and studies related to them. There were also several copies after such artists as Bassano, Titian and Cambiaso obviously made for sale as well as two original paintings by El Greco. The latter artist knew Sánchez Cotán and, in fact, owed him a considerable amount of money in 1603. A lot of other people did as well. Indeed, the artist seems to have had a notable financial acumen, had no debts, and lived in unusually comfortable circumstances for a painter of the time. What led Sánchez Cotán to leave all that behind may not have been unlike what we, today, might call a ‘mid-life crisis’, or a clarification of values:

What is clear is that 1603 was a watershed in the life of Sánchez Cotán. After that date religious subject matter, much of it related to the history of the Carthusian Order, almost exclusively occupied his efforts (there is circumstantial evidence that he painted one still life after that date). His style was gentle and poetic, conservative in its nature and completely devoid of the probing naturalism and dramatic contrasts of light and dark that characterise his still lifes. Francisco Pacheco wrote that Sánchez Cotán was famous for his still lifes before he became a Carthusian and that in painting such pictures he was following in the footsteps of his teacher, Bias de Prado, whose paintings of fruit Pacheco had personally seen in 1592 . This means that still-life painting was being cultivated in Toledo as early as it was anywhere else in Europe. What underlay this activity in the numerous centres where it took place whether in Antwerp, Milan, or Toledo – was a confluence of factors that seem to have rendered the outcome inevitable. Perhaps the most important of these was the consuming dialogue in humanist circles on the nature or painting, taking as its point of departure the texts of ancient authors, and the increasingly common debate on the superiority of the moderns over the ancients. An aspect of this discussion was the continual reference to Greek and Latin texts describing the compelling naturalism of ancient still lifes, all of which arc lost and existed then only in the imaginations of the discussants. For this reason, none of the ‘ekphratic’ still lifes painted in any of these disparate places looks like those painted anywhere else, but they all reflect the shift away from Renaissance idealisation toward the empirical vision of the proto-Baroque. They focused the discussion of the mimetic powers of the painter and the issue of illusion versus reality. No idea of the time held more of a sense of ‘modernity’. And this went hand in hand with the consuming interest in natural history and its wonder at the infinite diversity of Nature as a reflection of God’s bounty. In every place where the still life was pioneered, these concerns were flourishing: certainly in Toledo they were.

Already by 1599, what was probably a still life by Sánchez Cotán was recorded in the collection of the recently deceased Archbishop of Toledo, Cardinal Pedro Garcia de Loaysa (I534-I599) . His successor as primate of Spain, Cardinal Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas (I546-I6I8), uncle of Philip III’s all-powerful prime minister, seems to have bought many of the still lifes in the artist’s studio at the time of his retirement that were not specifically identified as already the property of others . In addition to an abiding interest in natural history, which led him to cultivate an extensive botanical garden at his country estate, with live specimens collected from the New World, Sandoval was, as Marcus Burke has said, ‘a connoisseur with modern tastes’. He commissioned three paintings from Carlo Saraceni and favoured the tenebrist style of the Toledan artist Luis Tristan. In their taste for still life, Loaysa and Sandoval seem to have shared the interests of their Milanese counterpart Cardinal Federico Borromeo, whose patronage around the same time of Caravaggio and Jan Brueghel was equally decisive for the early development of the genre.

Immediately following Sandoval’s death in 1618, five still lifes, almost certainly by Sánchez Cotán, were bought from his estate by Philip III to decorate his hunting lodge at El Pardo, and the following year the young Juan van der Hamen was commissioned to paint a sixth to complete the set (they were to be hung over six windows opening onto a landscape). The paintings were still in situ in 1700, following the death of King Carlos II, when they were described in enough detail to relate them to painting in Sánchez Cotán’s 1603 inventory. They remained in the royal collection until the Napoleonic period, when Joseph Bonaparte fled to France, and then America, with some of them.

Only six still lifes by Sánchez Cotán can be identified today. Four are in public collections in San Diego, Chicago, Madrid and Granada.