The Museo del Prado in Australia

Portrait of Spain: Masterpieces from the Prado has been specially curated for the Queensland Art Gallery (Brisbane, Australia) by the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. It is the largest and most significant international loan the Prado has ever undertaken, and is also the first exhibition from their collection ever to be shown in the Southern Hemisphere.

This exhibition features over 100 masterpieces from one of the most revered collections of European painting in the world and tells the story of the evolution of painting in Spain over three and a half centuries.

On display are masterpieces by leading painters of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including El Greco, Velázquez, Ribera and Murillo. Foreign artists who worked for the royal court and directly influenced the development of painting in Spain are also well represented, with superb paintings by Titian, Peter Paul Rubens, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo and Anton Raphael Mengs all featured.

The life and times of various levels of Spanish civil society are portrayed in works by noted artists from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Pre-eminent among these was Francisco de Goya, whose work is represented by major paintings and an important selection of prints from his three extraordinary and confronting series, Los Caprichos, Los Disparates and Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War).

Dates: through November 4.
Location: Queensland Art Gallery (QAG). Stanley Place, South Bank, Queensland, Australia
Opening hours: from Monday to Friday from 10am to 5pm. Saturday and Sunday from 9am to 5pm.