Hints and tips:
...Sotheby’s will offer a Diego Velázquez full-length portrait of Isabel de Borbón, queen of Spain and the first wife of Philip IV, for a princely $35mn in New York on February 1 2024....
...Overlooking Plaza Isabel II, it’s right opposite the Teatro Real opera house and a couple of minutes away from the royal palace....
...sculpture on wheels also based on a view of Isabel from afar: a moment of perfect visual affinity backed by biographical context — Isabel was both men’s lover (and Bacon’s only female partner)....
...Aping Velázquez’s sumptuous surfaces and grandeur of composition in the velvety purple 1950s popes in “Figure Sitting” and “Study for a Portrait”, or deconstructing Picasso’s deconstructions, and throwing...
...In the purple and gold “Pope I” (1951), the fragile, frightened pontiff, antithesis of Velázquez’s concentration of pomp and power, is imprisoned in a silvery space frame....
...If he wanted to make a self-portrait, or a portrait of his boyfriend George Dyer or friend Isabel Rawsthorne, he would start from a photograph Deakin had taken, often at Bacon’s request....
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