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<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/richard-hamilton-1244" aria-label="More by Richard Hamilton" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Richard Hamilton</a>
Picassos meninas
Purchased 1982
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<p><i>Picasso’s meninas </i>is an etching that plays an art-historical game by combining the composition of the celebrated painting by Diego Velázquez, <i>Las Meniñas</i>, 1656 (Museo del Prado, Madrid), with the graphic styles of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). The print came about as a result of a commission: Hamilton was invited by the Propylaen Press, Berlin to contribute to their portfolio <i>Hommage à Pablo Picasso</i>, celebrating Picasso’s ninetieth birthday in 1971. Feeling that any homage to Picasso would have to involve ‘displaying respect for the masterly craftsmanship and love of the medium that Picasso demonstrated in his own etchings’ (Hamilton in <i>Collected Words</i>, p.106),<i> </i>the artist made his contribution conditional on Picasso’s etcher, Aldo Crommelynck, agreeing to work with him. This was his first consideration before any thought of a subject for his print. Hamilton wrote:</p>
paper print etching
15 May 2008 – 14 September 2008
2008-09-14
15 May 2008 – 14 September 2008
2008-09-14
2008-05-15
Museu Picasso (Barcelona, Spain)
2008-05-15
Las Meninas
Loan-out
3 April 2015 – 12 July 2015
2015-07-12
3 April 2015 – 12 July 2015
2015-07-12
2015-04-03
Deichtorhallen Hamburg (Hamburg, Germany)
2015-04-03
Post-Picasso. Contemporary Art and Picasso
Loan-out
Picasso’s meninas
image: 570 × 490 mm
Purchased 1982
<p><i>Picasso’s meninas </i>is an etching that plays an art-historical game by combining the composition of the celebrated painting by Diego Velázquez, <i>Las Meniñas</i>, 1656 (Museo del Prado, Madrid), with the graphic styles of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). The print came about as a result of a commission: Hamilton was invited by the Propylaen Press, Berlin to contribute to their portfolio <i>Hommage à Pablo Picasso</i>, celebrating Picasso’s ninetieth birthday in 1971. Feeling that any homage to Picasso would have to involve ‘displaying respect for the masterly craftsmanship and love of the medium that Picasso demonstrated in his own etchings’ (Hamilton in <i>Collected Words</i>, p.106),<i> </i>the artist made his contribution conditional on Picasso’s etcher, Aldo Crommelynck, agreeing to work with him. This was his first consideration before any thought of a subject for his print. Hamilton wrote: 
<br/></p>
<blockquote>	I saw Velásquez’ <i>Las Meniñas </i>at the Prado for the first time in 1972 – its reputation as being among the greatest paintings that exist is well founded. The temptation to paraphrase Velásquez in Picasso’s styles proved irresistible ... <i>Las Meniñas </i>provided an opportunity to run the gamut of Picasso’s ‘periods’ in one plate – from ‘Rose’ through ‘Analytical Cubism’ to ‘Primitive’ to ‘Neo-Classical’ and so on. The stage of Velásquez’<i> Meniñas </i>could carry a lot of action, and the mysterious ambiguities (it seems to contain an infinity of cross reflections with the space the picture confronts), allowed some narrative interplay with substitutions of personalities as well as styles.</blockquote>
<blockquote>	(Quoted in <i>Collected Words</i>, p.106.)</blockquote>
<p>
<br/>Picasso had himself created forty-four analyses of Velásquez’s painting between August and December 1957, now hanging in the Museo Picasso, Barcelona. His versions of <i>Las Meniñas</i>, which include single characters from the original, are stylistically homogenous in the artist’s signature modernist style based on simplified geometric forms and dark line. By contrast, Hamilton’s homage inserts representational styles spanning the first half of the twentieth century into the seventeenth century composition. As his title suggests, Hamilton made the image of Picasso the most significant face in the group portrait. The subjects of the original painting – the centrally placed Infanta and her entourage or ‘<i>meniñas’</i> (the Portuguese word for girls, which came to mean maid of honour in the Spanish court) – have been transformed into the entourage of Picasso, the most realistically rendered character in the print. His portrait replaces the self-portrait of Velásquez, who painted himself standing next to the easel on which he is apparently working. In Hamilton’s print Picasso is ornamented with a hammer and sickle (referring to his communist sympathies) to replace the red cross of Santiago (the cross of St James) on Velásquez’s chest. 
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<br/>Hamilton drew the Infanta (the Spanish princess) in the style of Picasso’s Analytical Cubism of 1912. The lady-in-waiting standing on her left is depicted in the flat graphic language Picasso developed in the 1930s. Behind her, another female attendant is depicted in Picasso’s neo-classical style of the early 1920s and a male figure is drawn using spare lines and the vocabulary of African forms that Picasso was using around 1907. The female dwarf of the seventeenth century original has become a version of Picasso’s <i>Seated Woman</i>, 1927 (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto). Hamilton copied a harlequin from Picasso’s ‘pink’ period to replace the page in Velásquez’s painting, and a bull, closely resembling a painting of a dying bull that Picasso made in 1934 (<i>Dying Bull</i>, private collection, Switzerland) to replace the mastiff on which the seventeenth century page places his foot. He drew representations of Picasso’s paintings, <i>L’Aubade</i>,<i> </i>1942 (Musée d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) and <i>Three Musicians</i>,<i> </i>1921 (Museum of Modern Art, New York), on the wall behind the group of figures. Finally, in the mirror – the conceptual focal point of Velásquez’s painting, where King Philip IV of Spain and his consort Mariana, parents of the Infanta, appear as shadowy onlookers of the painting’s scene – Hamilton inserted himself and his girlfriend (later wife), the artist Rita Donagh (born 1939). According to Lullin: ‘They are rendered with a particular etching technique “invented” by Picasso. A mark drawn on an aquatint ground with a greasy crayon, such as lithographic chalk, will act as a resist to the acid and produce a white mark when printed.’ (Lullin, p.124.) Because of this technique, the two figures appear painted in the print. 
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<br/>A total of sixty-nine artists contributed to the <i>Hommage à Picasso </i>edition, which was split into six portfolios. Some of these are reproduced in the catalogue of the exhibition of the same title that was held in the Nationalgalerie, Berlin in 1973. Hamilton created three studies for <i>Picasso’s meninas</i> (<i>study I</i>,<i> II </i>and<i> II</i>, 1973, collection Rita Donagh, Northend) before he created the etching plate in Paris. He later developed the imitation and mixture of historical styles in a single image in the print <i>In Horne’s house</i>, 1981-2 (<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hamilton-in-hornes-house-p77483" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P77483</span></a>), where Cubism again features centrally, this time in the depiction of a spread of sardines and beer. 
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<br/><i>Picasso’s meninas </i>was printed by Pierro and Aldo Crommelynck at Atelier Crommelynck, Paris using hard-, soft-ground and stipple etching, open-bite and lift-ground aquatint, engraving, drypoint and burnishing on Rives paper. The process involved two sets of six stage proofs. It was produced in an edition of ninety with Arabic numerals and thirty with Roman numerals, plus fifteen artist’s proofs, fifteen <i>épreuves d’artistes</i>, fifteen publisher’s proofs, fifteen hors commerce proofs, one BAT and two printer’s proofs. It was published by Propyläen Verlag, Berlin and Pantheon Press, Rome in Portfolio Two of the <i>Hommage à Picasso</i>. Tate’s copy is the third of the <i>épreuves d’artistes</i>. It is signed and titled by the artist under the image.
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<br/><b>Further reading:</b>
<br/>Etienne Lullin, <i>Richard Hamilton: Prints and Multiples 1939-2002</i>, exhibition catalogue, Kunstmuseum Winterthur and Yale Center for British Art, New Haven 2003, pp.124-5, reproduced p.125 in colour.
<br/><i>Richard Hamilton: Prints 1939-83</i>, Stuttgart and London, 1984, pp.64-5, cat.88, reproduced p.65.
<br/><i>Richard Hamilton: Collected Words 1953-1982</i>, Stuttgart and London 1982, p.106, reproduced p.107 in colour.
<br/>
<br/>Elizabeth Manchester
<br/>October 2007</p>

Summary
2008-07-15T00:00:00
summary
SHORT_TEXT
<p><a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hamilton-picassos-meninas-p07659" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P07659</span></a> <b>Picasso's Meninas</b> 1973
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<br/>Etching, aquatint, engraving, drypoint and burnishing 22 1/2 × 19 1/4 (570 × 490) on Rives paper 29 7/8 × 22 1/2 (760 × 570), printed by Pierro and Aldo Crommelynck, Paris, published by Propyläen Verlag, Berlin in an edition of 120
<br/>Inscribed ‘Richard Hamilton’ and ‘Picasso's Meninas’ and ‘EA 3/15’
<br/>Purchased from Desmond Page (Grant-in-Aid) 1982
<br/><i>Lit</i>: Hamilton no.88, repr. p.65; Richard S. Field, Richard Hamilton Image and Process 1952–82, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, December 1983–February 1984, no.38 pp.51–3, repr. p.53
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<br/>This <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/print" title="Glossary definition for 'Print'"><span>print</span></a> was made for inclusion in Propyläen Verlag's mixed <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/portfolio" title="Glossary definition for 'Portfolio'"><span>portfolio</span></a> ‘Hommage à Picasso’, celebrating Picasso's 90th birthday.
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<br/><b>Published in:</b>
<br/><i>The Tate Gallery 1982-84: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions</i>, London 1986
<br/></p>

Catalogue entry
2004-10-13T00:00:00
catalogue-entry
CATALOGUE_ENTRY
adults animals: mammals architecture artist, ceramicist artist, draughtsman artist - non-specific artist, painter artist, printmaker artist, sculptor arts and entertainment bull characters Communism - hammer and sickle courtier cubist space domestic door emotions, concepts and ideas features fine art and design, named works fine arts and music formal qualities gallery group groups Harlequin individuals: male interiors literature and fiction man named individuals nationality objects painting people Picasso, Pablo Picasso, Pablo, paintings politics portraits royalty and social rank society Spanish studio symbols and personifications Velazquez, Diego, painting, ‘Las Meninas’ Velazquez, Diego, paintings woman work and occupations workspaces