Kagan Prize

Established in 2023 and awarded every other year, the Richard L. Kagan Prize recognizes the best article or chapter in an edited collection on the history of the early modern Spanish world, c. 1500-c. 1800. The prize honors the contributions to this field by Richard Kagan, Academy Professor and Arthur O. Lovejoy Professor Emeritus of History at Johns Hopkins University. Calls for submissions are generally in the fall; prizes are awarded the following spring and announced at our annual conference. Submissions will only be accepted from those who are active members at the time of submission. The prize carries an honorarium of $250.

The next call for submissions will be in Fall 2026.

2025 Kagan Prize Winner:

Adam Jasienski, “Velázquez and the Fragile Portrait of the King,” Art History 44, n. 5 (Nov. 2021): 922-947.

The committee on the Richard L. Kagan Prize (A. Katie Harris (chair), Silvia Z. Mitchell, and Magdalena Sánchez) is pleased to name Adam Jasienski as the inaugural recipient for his article, “Velázquez and the Fragile Portrait of the King.” Jasienski examines Velázquez’s portrait of the sculptor Juan Martínez Montañés (c. 1635), a painting that depicts the artist in the act of modeling a bust of King Philip IV that Velázquez has left arrestingly unfinished and incomplete. Contextualizing the painting within Spanish court culture and early modern artistic practice, Jasienski convincingly makes the novel argument that the painting was intentionally left unfinished as a way of adhering to the complex and decorous conventions that governed the representation of Spanish royalty. This insight offers new perspectives on the larger body of Velázquez’s royal portraits, especially Las Meninas (1656), and on the early modern portraits of Spanish monarchs more generally. Well-argued and firmly anchored in both the primary and secondary literature, this article is also a pleasure to read, thanks to Jasienski’s lucid, readable style.