On October 20, 1942, a letter arrived on the Civil House of the Generalissimo during which a debt of 9,000 pesetas was claimed from Francisco Franco for not paying three copies that he had ordered of a portray by Goya, particularly, the portrait of The Marchioness of Santa Cruz which the dictator purchased with the intention of giving it to Hitler. Franco favored the portray a lot that he ordered these variations to offer as items, however when the time got here to pay, he didn’t accomplish that, as is now revealed within the doc that the gallery proprietor and artwork historian José de la Mano, passionate concerning the painter, purchased on the finish of 2025 at El Rastro in Madrid.
The Marquis of Lozoya, Juan de Contreras, in control of Franco to search for the reward for Hitler, requested within the letter, within the kindest approach he knew how, to Julio Muñoz Aguilar, the dictator’s assistant, an answer for “an old issue,” as he describes it. “Almost a year ago, Ramón Serrano Súñer [cuñado y ministro de Franco] “He called me to tell me to urgently acquire a first-class Goya, which had to remain at the disposal of His Majesty the Generalissimo,” he writes. “The choice fell on the magnificent portrait of the Marchioness of Santa Cruz and the agreed price was one million, five hundred thousand pesetas, plus three copies of the same painting, which I contracted with the painter Nuñez Losada, an excellent copyist, for the price of 3,000 pesetas each,” he continues. “I received in hand from my cousin José Navarro a check for the amount exclusively of 1,500,000 pesetas. There remains, therefore, to pay for the artist’s three copies, that is, 9,000 pesetas more.”
“We knew the history of this painting well, but we knew that a piece was missing about what Franco’s purchase was like in 1941,” explain those responsible for the DELAMANO Old Masters gallery. “With this letter what’s confirmed is the quantity that the dictator paid, it was at all times believed that it was much less, a million pesetas, it is usually confirmed that he ordered three copies to offer to the household that owns the portray [los herederos de la marquesa]not one, and who’s the painter who made them,” the gallery owners point out. It is difficult to calculate the equivalent price today; if the CPI is taken as a reference, the cost in 2026 would be between 2.5 and three million euros. In asset terms, it can be considered an operation reserved only for an economic elite capable of acquiring a masterpiece above the current 10 million euros.
The story of the Goya painting that Franco wanted to give to Hitler has gone from urban legend to proven fact in a series of chapters that have been revealed for almost a decade. Several books and scientific studies have tried to reconstruct the journey of a piece that has passed through the hands and homes of noble Spanish families and those of the dictator; that it was illegally exported; and finally rescued by the State until returning to the Prado in 1986.
The new installment of this novel is not limited to the letter. Weeks after they bought it at El Rastro, one of the copies that Franco left behind appeared. “I’m obsessive about Goya, twice every week I search specialised web sites looking for every kind of supplies concerning the artist. Furthermore, for my work, I’ve to evaluate all of the auctions held on the earth,” says De la Mano. “In one in every of these critiques, I discovered within the public sale catalog of a palace within the south of France a portrait of the Marchioness of Santa Cruz. There I stated to myself: ‘This is one in every of Franco’s copies.’
He purchased the portray “blindly,” he says, as a result of the work was labeled as from the nineteenth century and its provenance was attributed to the supposed heirs of the marchioness. “I bid over the phone and took it,” says the gallerist. Upon receiving the piece he was capable of confirm that Nuñez Losada, the painter referred to by the Marquis of Lozoya within the letter during which he claims his debt, copied Goya’s signature, however beneath he famous that it was a duplicate of the Aragonese authentic. Bingo! It was a type of variations. “I don’t usually have this luck,” the artwork historian acknowledges with amusing.
“The work has a yellowish tone because it copies Goya’s original painting with its oxidized varnish, that is, when the piece was still dirty,” they clarify from the gallery. “The precariousness of painting materials after the Civil War has caused the painting to have extensive cracking that makes it look even older.”
How a lot is a piece of this sort price? “It is of a great quality that shows that it was copied before the original trying to interpret the qualities of Goya,” they are saying, though they don’t need to reveal the value. “It has more symbolic than commercial value, after all, it is a copy of a Goya painting.” In 1941, a mean annual wage in Spain was beneath 4,000 pesetas, which accounts for the worth of copies at the moment.
The good reward
The first chapter of this weird story begins in 1805, when Goya paints the portrait during which he disguises the younger Marchioness of Terpsichore, muse of dance, poetry and track. In his hand he locations a lyre on which he attracts a quadruped, a Basque image that consists of a four-headed cross, which shall be one of many keys for which Franco will select this work as a present.
In 1939, the dictator, who knew effectively that one in every of Hitler’s weaknesses was artwork, gave him three work by Zuloaga, as historian Arturo Colorado recounted in 2018 in his ebook Art, revenge and propaganda (Chair). But it didn’t seem to be sufficient, so to proceed with the courtship in direction of the one who appeared to be the proprietor of the world, Franco created a committee in control of trying to find a extra essential inventive jewel, a goya. “Further proof of the instrumentation of the heritage that he made at his convenience. He used it when it suited him as a secret negotiation weapon or as propaganda,” Colorado defined in an interview on this newspaper.
The archaeologist Julio Martínez Santaolalla, the Marquis of Lozoya, and Serrano Suñer took on the duty, with the recommendation, amongst others, of the artist José María Sert. They determined to The Marchioness of Santa Cruz for its neoclassical type they usually had been satisfied after they discovered the similarity between the 4 heads of the lyre and the Nazi swastika. The good icing on the cake.
During the Civil War the portray had been moved from Madrid to Valencia. From there he traveled to Barcelona till he lastly arrived in Geneva, from the place he returned to the capital of Spain when the conflict ended below the orders of the Franco authorities. In 1941, as confirmed by the letter acquired by De la Mano, Franco lastly purchased it for 1.5 million pesetas, not the million that was believed till now.
The dictator already had his inventive jewel, however determined to attend. The course of World War II modified, Spain declared itself impartial and eventually didn’t give the portray to Hitler.
In 1944, the work returned to the Prado Museum. Its proprietor is Franco, however this info disappears from official paperwork. And it’s at this second when the story of the marchioness’s portray turns into tangled. There are sure theories that keep that the work hung within the Palacio del Pardo till February 19, 1947, when it handed into the palms of its subsequent proprietor, Félix Fernández-Valdés. The hint of the cash confirms that the Basque collector additionally paid one and a half million pesetas for the material, in accordance with a receipt from the Banco de Vizcaya in Madrid included within the publication. Masterpieces from the Valdés Collectionrevealed by the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum between 2020 and 2021.
The portray remained within the Valdés assortment till 1981 or 1982, when it’s estimated that his heirs bought it – a number of research recommend that it value round 600 million pesetas – and the brand new homeowners illegally eliminated it from Spain. The Marchioness appeared in 1983 on the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles. The portray was on the market for 12 million {dollars}, about 39 million in the present day.
Representatives of the Ministry of Culture, then led by Javier Solana, and the lawyer Ramón Uría traveled to the west coast of the United States, in whose memoirs, the author Mercedes Cabrera, recounts for nearly 20 pages an thrilling highway film by totally different capitals of the world chasing the portray. Art sellers and collectors seem with few scruples and some huge cash; and even the lawyer of Queen Isabel II, key in attaining the judicial milestone that allowed the work to return to the Prado Museum in 1986.
This 2026 marks 40 years of this report and the artwork gallery is making ready an initiative to commemorate the return. “It served to recover a fundamental work and increase the country’s self-esteem, winning a process in international courts,” stated Miguel Falomir, director of the museum, in an interview in EL PAÍS in 2018.
In lower than two months, the DELAMANO Oldmasters gallery has solved one other chapter of this story, however of their obsession to proceed investigating, they confirmed Prado specialists their findings. It was on the museum that the curators requested the gallery homeowners if the copy they’d purchased within the south of France was that of Imelda Marcos, the extreme spouse of the Filipino dictator Ferdinad Marcos. The response was the specialists’ shocked faces. They had simply been given a brand new clue. “I have not found Imelda’s work, but after further investigation, she had a painting of the Marchioness with the same measurements as the copy I bought,” says the gallerist, marking the way in which to a brand new discovery.
https://elpais.com/cultura/2026-01-18/una-carta-revela-lo-que-franco-pago-y-lo-que-dejo-a-deber-por-el-goya-que-quiso-regalarle-a-hitler.html