LA’s Getty Museum Acquires Recently Rediscovered Velázquez Painting, a First for a West Coast Museum

The Getty Museum in Los Angeles has acquired Portrait of the Count-Duke of Olivares, a painting that was recently attributed to Diego Velázquez. The acquisition means a Velázquez painting will for the first time be represented in the collection of a West Coast museum.

Earlier this year, Detroit Institute of Arts director Salvador Salort-Pons, a scholar on Velázquez who is curating an exhibition on portraits of the Count-Duke of Olivares, published his findings in the Museo Prado’s ARS Magazine. He said he had not only rediscovered a new portrait of the Count-Duke but that the work was by Velázquez and dated to his earliest days as a court painter. Salort-Pons dated the painting to 1626, which the Getty has revised to “about 1626.”

Gaspar de Guzmán y Pimental, the Count-Duke of Olivares, was Philip IV’s powerful prime minister during this period and “held near-absolute power over Spanish governance for over two decades,” according to a release. He was also responsible for bringing Velázquez to the Spanish court. Olivares became a frequent subject of Velázquez across his 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 in a phone interview of the decision to acquire the painting. “The portrait is quite powerful. It’s painted in a very sophisticated way.”

“We are very confident about the attribution, and I think it’s very solid research,” Gasparotto added, noting that the attribution had been confirmed by Guillaume Kientz, the 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. The majority of the 120 extant paintings by Velázquez are primarily held by museums across the world; around 50 of those works are owned by the Prado. Around a dozen Velázquez paintings are still in private hands. The artist’s auction record was achieved in 2007 when Saint Rufina (ca. early 1630s) sold at Sotheby’s for £8.42 million (then around $17 million). That painting, however, had long been attributed to Spanish Baroque painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo but was reattributed to Velázquez ahead of its sale in 1999 at Christie’s for $8.9 million.

The painting will go on view at the Getty Museum later this fall, and will stay there until around the end of the year. It will then be loaned to the DIA for Salort-Pons’s exhibition “Velázquez & Olivares: Early Years at Court,” which will be on view from 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 Getty first became aware of Salort-Pons’s discovery of the painting and his intention to attribute it to Velázquez this past March, and learned that its owner was willing to sell it. (The seller had acquired it in 2025 from the Coppellotti collection, which had acquired 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, it was offered the Spanish master’s 1650 portrait of Ferdinando Brandani by the now-defunct gallery Wildenstein & Co. but turned it down. The work was acquired by the Prado in 2003.

Once the Getty expressed interest, the painting was brought to Los Angeles for its curators to assess its condition and any potential conservation needs, as well as subjecting it to further technical analysis. Describing the “overall condition [as] excellent,” Gasparotto said the painting does not need to undergo conservation as it was subjected to a standard cleaning last year as it had been in a private collection for so long.

“The painting was brought here as is our normal policy,” Gasparotto continued. “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 characterized Salort-Pons’s research as “thorough and very convincing,” calling out the connection between the newly attributed portrait and a 1626 engraving, Allegorical Portrait of the Count-Duke, by Paulus Pontius, made in collaboration with Velázquez and Peter Paul Rubens. In Rubens’s preparatory sketch, now owned by Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Olivares is shown wearing black with a fur-lined garment. Salort-Pons’s X-ray analysis showed that this costume was the one Velázquez had originally depicted Olivares wearing.

Instead, both the Velázquez and the Pontius works show Olivares in armor that would have been manufactured in Brussels around 1625–26. The two key details are that Velázquez’s is a mirror image of the Pontius’s engraving and that Velázquez “painted only one of the two rivets located on the upper left arm,” Salort-Pons writes, calling it an “imperfection [meant] to capture the viewer’s attention and emphasize his technical virtuosity.”

Salort-Pons concludes that the newly attributed 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.”

Since joining the Getty in 2014, Gasparotto said he has been working to grow its holdings in Spanish painting. When he arrived, the museum owned one painting by Murillo (acquired in 2003), one by Jusepe de Ribera (2001), one by El Greco (2000), and two by Francisco Goya (1983 and 1993). In 2023, the Getty acquired Christ Carrying the Cross (about 1565) by Luis de Morales, also known as “El Divino.” Another major Spanish artist like Francisco de Zurbarán, who will be the subject of a retrospective at the Louvre next month, is not represented in the Getty’s holdings.

In Velázquez’s Portrait of the Count-Duke of Olivares, Gasparotto said the museum had found what it desires 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.”