A Defesa de Cádis contra os Ingleses

Zurbarán painted this in 1634 for a very particular room, the Hall of Realms in Madrid's new Buen Retiro palace, where Philip IV wanted the walls to advertise Spanish victories. The event is the defence of the port of Cádiz in November 1625, when an English fleet of about a hundred ships and ten thousand men landed and, within a week, was driven off with heavy losses. But Zurbarán, better known for still, prayerful monks, shows almost no fighting. The old commander Fernando Girón, too ill to stand, sits in a chair at the front giving orders while officers gather round him and the battle is pushed far back across the bay. He hangs in the same series that once held Velázquez's Surrender of Breda, and beside that famous canvas his stiff foreground council of war has always looked the work of a man out of his usual element.