The Communion

The Communion, painted in 1855 on a copper support and now in the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, demonstrates Eugenio Lucas Velázquez's range beyond his more celebrated bullfighting and Inquisition subjects. Religious scenes—baptisms, communions, processions, last rites—were a persistent strand of his work, treated not as devotional images but as occasions for depicting crowd behaviour, architectural interiors, and the theatrical dimension of Catholic ritual in mid-nineteenth-century Spain. The choice of copper as a support in 1855 is notable: copper had been a preferred surface for small-scale devotional and genre painting since the seventeenth century, prized for the luminous quality it imparted to oil paint. Lucas Velázquez's use of the medium here situates the work within a knowing relationship to the Old Master tradition even as his technique remained emphatically Romantic in its gestural freedom. The Bilbao Fine Arts Museum holds important collections of Basque and broader Spanish art from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Oil on copper produces characteristically jewel-like saturation: the ground does not absorb paint in the way canvas does, resulting in colours that remain bright and glazes that achieve exceptional transparency. Lucas Velázquez would have exploited this to render candlelight and gilded church furnishings with unusual luminosity.