Getty Acquires Rediscovered Velázquez, a First for the West Coast

The Getty Museum in Los Angeles has acquired Portrait of the Count-Duke of Olivares, a painting recently attributed to Diego Velázquez. The purchase marks the first time a Velázquez painting enters the collection of a West Coast museum.

The attribution comes from Salvador Salort-Pons, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts and a Velázquez scholar who is curating an exhibition on portraits of the Count-Duke of Olivares. He published his findings earlier this year in the Museo Prado's ARS Magazine, arguing that he had rediscovered not only a new portrait of the Count-Duke but one painted by Velázquez during his earliest days as a court painter. Salort-Pons dated the work to 1626; the Getty has revised the date to "about 1626."

Gaspar de Guzmán y Pimental, the Count-Duke of Olivares, served as Philip IV's prime minister and "held near-absolute power over Spanish governance for over two decades," according to a release. He was also the man responsible for bringing Velázquez to the Spanish court, and Olivares became a frequent subject across the artist's oeuvre.

"Velázquez is a major artist who we don't have represented in the collection," Davide Gasparotto, the Getty Museum's senior curator of paintings, told ARTnews by phone. "The portrait is quite powerful. It's painted in a very sophisticated way."

He added: "We are very confident about the attribution, and I think it's very solid research." Gasparotto noted that the attribution had been confirmed by Guillaume Kientz, director and chief executive of the Hispanic Society Museum & Library in New York and a Velázquez scholar.

The Getty did not disclose the purchase price. Of the roughly 120 extant paintings by Velázquez, most are held by museums worldwide, with around 50 owned by the Prado. Around a dozen remain in private hands. The artist's auction record dates to 2007, when Saint Rufina (ca. early 1630s) sold at Sotheby's for £8.42 million, then around $17 million. That canvas had long been attributed to Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and was reattributed to Velázquez ahead of a 1999 sale at Christie's, where it fetched $8.9 million.

The Getty first learned of Salort-Pons's discovery and the owner's willingness to sell this past March. The seller had acquired the painting in 2025 from the Coppellotti collection, which had bought it at some point in the 20th century.

"We were immediately very excited," Gasparotto said. "There is a history here at the Getty of trying to acquire a painting by Velázquez." In the early 2000s, the now-defunct gallery Wildenstein & Co. offered the museum Velázquez's 1650 portrait of Ferdinando Brandani. The Getty turned it down; the Prado acquired the work in 2003.

Once the Getty expressed interest, the painting was brought to Los Angeles for assessment, technical analysis and a review of potential conservation needs. Gasparotto described its "overall condition [as] excellent" and said it requires no conservation beyond a standard cleaning carried out last year, after its long stretch in private hands.

"The painting was brought here as is our normal policy," Gasparotto said. "We had some time to spend with the picture, which is what we usually do for a major acquisition to look at it in the light of the galleries and in the [conservation] studio. In the end, we were persuaded that this was the right Velázquez for the Getty."

Gasparotto called Salort-Pons's research "thorough and very convincing," highlighting its connection to a 1626 engraving, Allegorical Portrait of the Count-Duke, by Paulus Pontius, made in collaboration with Velázquez and Peter Paul Rubens. Rubens's preparatory sketch, now owned by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, shows Olivares in black with a fur-lined garment. Salort-Pons's X-ray analysis showed this was the costume Velázquez had originally painted before changing it.

Both the Velázquez and the Pontius works instead show Olivares in armor manufactured in Brussels around 1625–26. Two details carry weight: Velázquez's composition is a mirror image of the Pontius engraving, and Velázquez "painted only one of the two rivets located on the upper left arm," as Salort-Pons writes, calling it an "imperfection [meant] to capture the viewer's attention and emphasize his technical virtuosity."

Salort-Pons concludes that the painting "clearly suggests that it is the original source rather than a copy of the print. Furthermore, the conception and masterful execution of the missing rivet hole are hallmarks of Velázquez's genius."

The painting goes on view at the Getty later this fall and remains there until around the end of the year. It then travels to the DIA for Salort-Pons's exhibition "Velázquez & Olivares: Early Years at Court," running January–July 2027. "From a scholarly point of view, it will be very interesting to see the painting in the context of the other depictions of Olivares by Velázquez," Gasparotto said.

The acquisition caps a decade of effort by Gasparotto, who joined the Getty in 2014, to strengthen its Spanish holdings. At his arrival, the museum owned one Murillo (2003), one Jusepe de Ribera (2001), one El Greco (2000) and two Goyas (1983 and 1993). In 2023 the Getty acquired Luis de Morales's Christ Carrying the Cross (about 1565). Francisco de Zurbarán, the subject of a Louvre retrospective opening next month, remains unrepresented.

In the newly attributed portrait, Gasparotto said, the museum found what it seeks in a major acquisition: "a painting which is artistically significant, by a major artist, and that brings a lot of history. This is a really important example of the tradition of the state portrait."

He continued: "We are a small collection. We don't aim to be encyclopedic, but we aim to show the best of the tradition of European painting. It's not easy to find works that are the level of quality that we aspire to."