From one extreme to another—there's no middle ground here.
A painting once celebrated as the Prado's greatest treasure has returned to its halls after more than 150 years of institutional exile. José Aparicio's 1818 monumental canvas — depicting Madrid's starving citizens defiantly refusing French bread as their children perished — was commissioned as an act of royal statecraft, rose to become the museum's main attraction, and then fell so completely from favor that it became a byword for poor taste. Its homecoming invites us to sit with a disquieting truth: the hierarchies of art history we inherit as permanent were, in fact, assembled by the shifting politics and prejudices of each passing generation.
- A painting exiled for over 150 years has quietly reclaimed its place inside the very institution that once held it as its crown jewel — and then discarded it like an embarrassment.
- The tension at the heart of this return is not about one forgotten canvas but about the unsettling machinery of taste itself: how a work can be sublime, then ridiculous, then worthy of serious study, without changing a single brushstroke.
- Goya's ascent as the canonical witness to Spain's Napoleonic trauma was not inevitable — it was constructed over decades, displacing Aparicio's once-celebrated vision of the same suffering.
- The Prado's new exhibition series, A Work, a Story, is attempting something genuinely difficult: asking visitors to hold a painting's propagandistic intent and its human power in the same gaze, without resolving the contradiction.
- The painting's trajectory — from royal commission to punchline to museum centerpiece — now functions as the exhibition's sharpest argument, a mirror turned on the very act of aesthetic judgment.
Walk into the Prado today and the gravitational center is Las Meninas — Velázquez's impossible frozen moment, the work that shapes how visitors move through the building. But when the museum first opened its doors, the painting that stopped people was something else entirely: a massive allegorical canvas by José Aparicio showing starving Madrileños refusing bread from French soldiers even as their children died around them. The Year of the Famine in Madrid was the museum's main attraction. By the late 1800s, it had become a punchline.
Aparicio painted the work in 1818, in the years following Spain's liberation from Napoleonic occupation. He was court painter to Ferdinand VII, and the canvas was conceived as an instrument of statecraft — binding the restored monarch to his people by celebrating their suffering and sacrifice. The message was literally inscribed on a pillar in the background: 'Nothing without Ferdinand.' Visitor records from those early decades confirm what the painting's prominence suggests: people came specifically to see it.
The fall was as dramatic as the rise. By the 1870s, Ferdinand's absolutist reign was three decades gone, Spain was moving toward its first republic, and the Prado's new director had no patience for Aparicio's royalist fervor. What had once seemed noble now seemed naive; what had moved audiences now struck them as maudlin. An 1879 book offered a test for identifying a person of poor aesthetic judgment: the first sign was admiring Aparicio's painting. In 1874, it was removed from the museum and spent the next century and a half wandering through government ministries, the senate, and other Madrid institutions.
Meanwhile, Goya's depictions of the same era — The Third of May 1808 among them — rose to become the canonical artistic testimony of Spain's trauma. Yet this hierarchy was not always obvious. 'Back then, The Year of the Famine in Madrid was one of the most modern paintings,' said curator Carlos G Navarro. 'It represented a greater modernity than Goya, who was seen as an artist following vernacular traditions.' The story of who matters and why was written afterward, by changing tastes and changing politics.
This spring, the Prado has brought the painting home as the inaugural work in a new series called A Work, a Story, designed to place paintings in their full historical and political context. The curators are careful to say they are not rehabilitating Aparicio or correcting a historical wrong. They want visitors to grapple with something more unsettling: how taste actually works. We speak of aesthetic judgment as fixed and canonical, as if greatness were always self-evident. Aparicio's painting — great, then nothing, then ridiculous, now returned — suggests otherwise. The canvas did not change. What changed was the world looking at it.
Walk into room 12 of the Prado today and you will find yourself before Las Meninas—Velázquez's five-year-old princess, the sleepy mastiff, the painter himself frozen in that impossible moment. It is the museum's gravitational center, the work that draws crowds and shapes how visitors move through the building. But two centuries ago, when the Prado first opened its doors, the painting that stopped people in their tracks was something altogether different: a massive allegorical canvas by José Aparicio depicting starving Madrileños in the grip of famine, refusing bread from French soldiers even as their children died around them. The Year of the Famine in Madrid was the museum's main attraction, the work that visitors came specifically to see. By the late 1800s, it had become a punchline.
Aparicio painted his monumental work in 1818, in the years following Spain's liberation from Napoleonic occupation. He was court painter to King Ferdinand VII, and the painting was conceived as an instrument of statecraft—a way to bind the recently restored monarch to the hearts of his people by celebrating Madrid's suffering and sacrifice. The message was explicit, inscribed on a pillar in the background: "Nothing without Ferdinand." The work was given pride of place in the Royal Museum of Painting and Sculpture, which would later become the Prado. When you examine the visitor records from those early decades, the evidence is unmistakable. People came to see Raphael's works, yes, and eventually Las Meninas would claim its throne. But in the beginning, they came for Aparicio.
The painting's fall was as dramatic as its rise. By the 1870s, the political landscape had shifted entirely. Ferdinand's absolutist reign had ended three decades earlier. Spain was moving toward its short-lived first republic. The Prado's director, Antonio Gisbert Pérez—himself a painter—had no patience for Aparicio's work. Gisbert's own celebrated painting, The Execution of Torrijos and His Companions on the Beach at Málaga, honored a general who had fought against Ferdinand's tyranny. In this new climate, Aparicio's patriotic fervor began to seem not noble but naive, not moving but maudlin. The painting lost its meaning and became, in the words of one curator, "a tasteless joke."
The evidence of this reversal is almost comical in its cruelty. An 1879 book offered a taste test for identifying a person of poor aesthetic judgment: the first sign was that they enjoyed visiting the Prado to admire Aparicio's painting. By the end of the century, the work had become synonymous with bad taste itself. In 1874, it was removed from the museum. For more than 150 years, it wandered—housed in a government ministry, then the senate, then another Madrid museum—a work in exile from the institution that had once celebrated it as its crown jewel.
Meanwhile, Francisco Goya's depictions of civilian suffering during the occupation—works like The Third of May 1808—rose to eclipse Aparicio entirely. Goya's paintings became the canonical artistic testimony of that era, the works through which subsequent generations understood Spain's trauma. Yet this was not always the case. "Back then, The Year of the Famine in Madrid was one of the most modern paintings," said Carlos G Navarro, one of the curators of the new exhibition. "It represented a greater modernity than Goya, who, in his time, was seen as an artist who followed vernacular traditions." The hierarchy we now take for granted—Goya as the great witness, Aparicio as the forgotten propagandist—was not inevitable. It was constructed, over decades, by changing tastes and changing politics.
This spring, the Prado has brought The Year of the Famine in Madrid home. The painting is the inaugural work in a new exhibition series called A Work, a Story, designed to encourage visitors to consider paintings not in isolation but in their full historical and political context. The Prado's director, Miguel Falomir, describes the aim as helping viewers "reflect on aspects of art history that often go unnoticed." In Aparicio's case, that means confronting the painting's propagandistic intent, its relationship to collective trauma, and the way artistic taste reshapes what we remember and what we forget.
The curators are careful to say they are not attempting to rehabilitate Aparicio's reputation or right some historical wrong. Rather, they want visitors to grapple with a more unsettling question: how does taste actually work? We speak of aesthetic judgment as if it were fixed, canonical, immutable—as if certain works are great and others are not, and this has always been so. The Year of the Famine in Madrid suggests otherwise. It was great, then it was nothing, then it was ridiculous. The painting itself did not change. What changed was the world looking at it, and the values that world brought to bear. Aparicio's work sits within a long lineage of Spanish political painting—from Goya through to Picasso's Guernica—but it alone serves as a mirror held up to the machinery of taste itself, showing how each generation rewrites the story of what matters and why.
Citas Notables
The importance this picture had was massive, and so was the scale of its fall. There's no middle ground here; it's from one extreme to another.— Celia Guilarte Calderón de la Barca, curator
This is a work that went from being at the pinnacle of art history to being relegated to its less important corridors. It perfectly exemplifies the journeys of taste and how our idea of taste, which we think is canonical and immutable, actually changes with each generation.— Carlos G Navarro, curator
La Conversación del Hearth Otra perspectiva de la historia
Why did this painting fall so completely out of favor? It wasn't like taste shifted gradually—it seems to have become actively despised.
The timing is crucial. The painting's entire meaning was bound up with Ferdinand VII's restored monarchy. Once that political moment passed, once Spain began moving toward republicanism, the work became an embarrassment to the people running the museum. It wasn't just unfashionable—it represented the wrong side of history.
But Goya painted similar subjects, scenes of suffering under occupation. Why did his work survive and Aparicio's didn't?
Goya's paintings were more ambiguous, more psychologically complex. They didn't serve a single political master. Aparicio's work was too direct, too obviously a tool of propaganda. And by the time Goya's reputation was fully established, the cultural conversation had moved on. Aparicio became the cautionary tale.
The book that used liking Aparicio as a test for bad taste—that's almost cruel.
It is. But it shows how completely the reversal was. The painting didn't just lose favor; it became a marker of vulgarity. To like it was to reveal yourself as someone without discernment. That's a powerful form of erasure.
Do you think the Prado's new exhibition will change how people see it?
I don't think that's the point. The curators aren't trying to make Aparicio great again. They're using the painting to ask a bigger question: if taste can shift this dramatically, what does that tell us about the judgments we're making right now? What are we dismissing today that future generations might reconsider?