Visual tapas

Last spring, in honour of the reopening of the refurbished York Art Gallery, the statue of local artist William Etty RA outside the entrance — striking a swagger pose to rival Reynolds’s outside the Royal Academy — got a wash and brush-up from the City Council. This spring, it welcomes the public to an ambitious exhibition for a provincial gallery: Spanish Masters, the first Spanish painting survey in Britain since the one at the Academy in 1976.

Admittedly, York’s survey is a little smaller. By borrowing ten works from the Bowes Museum — owner of the UK’s biggest collection of Spanish paintings outside London — and adding others from here and there to its own holdings, York Art Gallery has managed to put together a taster exhibition of Spanish painting from the Golden Age to the age of Goya. With a total of 17 works, Spanish Masters is what you might call a speed-dating introduction to Spanish art. But its small selection of religious paintings, portraits and still lifes does succeed in giving a flavour of the unique culture that gave birth to St Teresa of Avila and Cervantes, and embraced the visionary and the vernacular with equal ease.

After a quiet start with a pair of gilded panels of 1510 by the Toledan artist Juan de Borgona depicting the four doctors of the early Church at their manuscripts, the visionary tendency gains the ascendant in El Greco’s ‘Tears of St Peter’, a Levitation of St Francis from the circle of Zurbar