Bishop Auckland Castle - The Zurbaran Paintings of the Patriarchs

These paintings are under immediate threat - the diocese of Durham is seeking to sell them. Dr Robert McManners and  Dr. Alan Patterson is campaigning to stop the sale and retain these valuable paintings which are part of our heritage for posterity.

 Zurbaran at Auckland Castle

It has frequently been suggested that the scenes were painted purely speculatively for sale in the New World to where, it was traditionally believed, the Twelve Tribes of Israel had been scattered (2 Kings 17) following the Assyrian King Shalmaneser's invasion of Israel. Legend has it that the canvases were captured by licensed pirates - corsairs - during their Atlantic voyage and returned to Europe as bounty. Considering the potential hazards of both the domestic religious climate and of the hostility of the suggested journey, it seems almost inconceivable that an artist of Zurbaran's status should take such risks. Although not previously postulated, it would seem much more likely that Zurbaran had a powerful Jewish patron who commissioned these pictures and that they never left Europe. Would an artist risk persecution or even death at the hands of the Chief Inquisitor or the loss of such meticulous and valuable pictures to the Atlantic elements or to piracy at a time, the 1640s, when his work was still in great demand for the churches and monasteries of Spain? Certainly there were commissioned works or fine quality being exported. In 1665 Sevilhan master-painter Juan Lopez Carrasco is recorded as receiving a commission for 'twenty-four Patriarchs of high quality' for the colonial market. Similarly, if the Bishop Auckland series of Patriarchs had gone to the New World, it would be reasonable to assume that some documentation of their export or re-import would exist. The 'corsair theory', of course, neatly sidesteps this weakness m the 'export argument' for its proponents as the theft of the paintings whilst at sea would preclude any 'paperwork'. This piracy theory, of course, does not explain the absence of any record of the original commission. Much, but by no means all, of the documentation for Zurbaran's commissioned works still exists and the most likely explanation for the absence of formal documentation of the origin of the Bishop Auckland series is simply that it has been lost.

The history of the paintings and their whereabouts for the first one hundred or so years of their existence is not known and it would seem that this void has been filled by imaginative speculation and there is no evidence to substantiate the romantic notion of piracy. (This notion first appeared in writing as late as 1948 when the pictures were documented in The Inventory of See Houses produced for the newly formed Church Commissioners). The pictures were probably commissioned, by and destined for a Spanish client but history does not tell us and probably never will.

This 'disappearance' of Zurbaran's work was not confined to the Bishop Auckland series of Patriarchs. Whilst acknowledged as a master in his lifetime, in his later life Zurbaran slipped into artistic obscurity and, following his death, into almost total oblivion, his works being hidden in the churches and monasteries that had commissioned them. This was largely because of changing artistic taste and a move away from the severe Mannerist Baroque style old Zurbaran to the rounder, softer Rococo of the late 17th century. Zurbaran was to pay for his stylistic rigidity and die penniless.