This excellent and beautiful museum in Paris recently brought together some forty works from New York’s Hispanic Society of America, tracing the drama, devotion and extraordinary visual language of Spain’s Golden Age.

There are few places in Paris better suited to the theatricality of the Baroque than the Musée Jacquemart-André. Behind its Haussmann façade, rooms of gilded mouldings, carved wood and velvet provide an appropriately sumptuous setting for Baroque Splendors: From El Greco to Velázquez, an exhibition devoted to the extraordinary flowering of Hispanic art between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It ran until 2 August 2026, and featured remarkable paintings by El Greco, Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Zurbarán.

The timing is particularly significant. The Hispanic Society, founded in New York in 1904 by the American philanthropist and collector Archer Milton Huntington, holds more than 18,000 objects spanning Spanish, Portuguese, Latin American and related cultures. With its New York headquarters undergoing renovation, a selection of its most important works has been travelling internationally, allowing Paris to encounter a collection that has long been something of a hidden treasure beyond Spain itself.

The Spanish Golden Age unfolded under the Habsburg monarchy, when Spain’s political and commercial reach extended across Europe and into the Americas and Asia. Italian and Flemish influences met Spanish traditions, while encounters with the newly conquered territories of the Americas introduced new materials, subjects and visual possibilities. The resulting art is at once intensely local and remarkably cosmopolitan.

Few artists understood that tension better than El Greco and the room dedicated to the artist was a highlight of the show. His elongated figures and feverish spirituality seem almost uncoupled from the physical world. His Head of Saint Francis, painted around 1590–1599, is particularly striking in its restraint: a close-up profile reduced to essentials, the saint’s face emerging against a dark ground. Rather than the spectacle one might expect from Baroque art, it is a study in concentration.

Velázquez’ portraits resist theatricality even as they command attention. A young girl looks out from one of his paintings with an expression that remains deliberately unresolved; we are left uncertain whether she is curious, melancholy or simply lost in thought. It is this refusal to explain the sitter completely that makes Velázquez feel so startlingly modern.

Elsewhere, Zurbarán brings a different kind of intensity. His Saint Emerentiana and Saint Lucy, both painted in the 1630s, possess the stillness and frontal presence appropriate to their religious purpose. Their saturated colours, carefully rendered fabrics and direct gazes turn devotional imagery into something almost cinematic. These are paintings in which fabric becomes architecture, colour becomes atmosphere and the human figure becomes an instrument of devotion. The inclusion of his work makes for an interesting contrast with the show currently on view at The National Gallery in London.

Around these celebrated names, the exhibition broadens its narrative. Works by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Juan Carreño de Miranda and Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo reveal the artistic network that surrounded the Spanish court and its religious institutions. Carreño de Miranda, who succeeded Velázquez as portraitist to the royal family, represents the continuation of a courtly tradition in which painting was closely bound to power, identity and ceremony.

But perhaps the most revealing part of the exhibition comes when the story moves beyond Spain. The final rooms examine how Spanish visual culture travelled across the Atlantic, particularly into Mexico. Here, European religious iconography encounters local traditions and materials, producing works that feel unmistakably different from their European counterparts. Colonialism isn’t directly discussed and the wider socio-religious context of the era takes centrestage.

Among the most remarkable are the enconchados: paintings executed on wood and embellished with fragments of mother-of-pearl. Their surfaces catch the light in unexpected ways, transforming familiar biblical scenes into objects of almost jewel-like opulence. Nicolás de Correa’s The Wedding at Cana, painted in 1696, is an especially spectacular example, demonstrating how the Baroque was not simply exported from Europe but transformed through contact with the Americas.

The programme continues from 11 September 2026 to 24 January 2027, when the Musée Jacquemart-André turns from the Spanish Baroque to one of the defining figures of Italian Mannerism. Tintoretto will be devoted to Jacomo Robusti, known as Tintoretto (1518/19–1594), and will present, for the first time in France, a comprehensive overview of the Venetian painter’s entire career. The exhibition will explore not only the ambition and innovation of Tintoretto’s work, but also the remarkable reach of his artistic legacy, tracing how his treatment of movement, light and space transcended temporal and geographic boundaries to influence 19th-century French painting.

Following an exhibition defined by the theatricality and spiritual intensity of the Spanish Baroque, Tintoretto offers a natural continuation of the Jacquemart-André’s exploration of European painting at its most ambitious: artists who pushed against convention, transformed the visual language of their time and continued to shape the imagination long after their deaths. Paris, it seems, has plenty more Old Masters to celebrate!

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Image: Diego Velázquez, Portrait of a Little Girl, ca. 1638-1642, oil on canvas, 51.5 x 41 cm. photo: courtesy of The Hispanic Society of America, New York