Philip IV (1605 - 1666)
Role: King of SpainDates:
Portrait Location: Library Annex
Artist: unknown (Circle of John Singer Sargent) ()
Portrait Date:
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 25 " x 18"
Framed Dimensions:
Brown Portrait Number: 192
Brown Historical Property Number: 2276
This portrait of King Philip IV of Spain (1605 – 1665) is an interpretive copy of Diego Velazquez’s painting “King Philip IV as a Huntsman” in the collection of the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid. Philip IV is remembered for supporting the arts and especially for his patronage of Velazquez. Although Brown’s portrait of Philip IV is unsigned, a note in the Brown University Archives records that it was found in the London studio of the American painter John Singer Sargent after that painter’s death in 1925. Sargent’s journals record that he visited the Prado on several occasions to study and sketch the paintings there, and based on that provenance and his presumed familiarity with the Velazquez portrait, the Brown portrait of Philip has traditionally been attributed to Sargent.
In 1957 descendants of renowned Brown Professor William Carey Poland (1846 – 1929) presented this portrait to Brown University at the time of the dedication of Poland House, the Keeney Quad dormitory named in honor of their father and grandfather. Poland, whose own likeness is portrayed in Brown Portrait 140, was a member of the Brown Class of 1868 who returned to Brown as Professor of Greek and Latin. After a year as director of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, he was named Brown's first Professor in the History of Art, a position in which he served with great distinction until his retirement in 1915.
It is unknown whether or not Brown’s portrait of King Philip IV was ever installed in Poland House, although experience has shown that undergraduate dormitories are not always kind to artworks, and by the 1970s this painting was in the University Library. In 1983 it was installed in the offices of the Council on International Studies, a predecessor of the Watson Institute for International Studies. In a campus-wide survey conducted in 1990 it could not be located, and for 25 years was listed simply as "location unknown."
In 2015 a Brown University Library researcher noted the similarity of Brown's missing portrait of Philip IV to a portrait of the same description in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Upon investigation by the curators of these two institutions, it became clear that this was the same painting, donated to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1998 by a former employee of Brown University. In 2016 the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Fine Arts voted to return the painting to Brown.