spanish painters | Guillermo Coll

15Sep 2022 by Enriquecoll_1601 No Comments

The Small Tramps by Fernand Pelez

Painting

The French artist, of Spanish origin, Fernand Pelez (1843-1913) is little known. Another painter born in the 19th century one absolutely needs to re-discover; that’s why we advise to pay a visit to the Petit Palais in Paris. Influenced by the boldest realism, he devoted most of his works to tramps and under-privileged people (paying particular attention to children). We find today that both academicism and Pelez’s neat technique are against those pathetic characters, that sordid environment but we need to point out that at no time did he commit himself to sentimentalism like other painters such as Bouguereau. Some of Pelez’s paintings are unforgettable like the one with a young flower-seller, who sleeps completely exhausted on a step. The picture of the ‘petit misère’ begging in a doorway is…

Josep Tapiró i Baró

Illustration

In the last half of the 19th century more and more European artists were interested in exotic old cultures, Arab matters in particular. So many of them travelled to North Africa and the Middle East. These were the so-called ‘Orientalists’. As far as the French ones are concerned, they were formally a group of artists. We need to point out the undeniable quality of painters such as Jean-Léon Gérôme, Giulio Rosati and Ludwig Deutsch, but nowadays the reality they depicted seems much stereotyped. One of the most important one, although less known, was the Catalan painter Josep Tapiró i Baró (1836-1913), whose water-colour portraits are so splendid. The water-colour possibilities are taken to a maximum quality. Since his childhood he was a friend of Mariano Fortuny. Both of them studied…

Luis Melendez

Painting

There is an old building near my home with a plaque to show the location of Miguel Jacinto Melendez’s workshop. He was a painter in the court of the Spanish King Felipe V. I often thought about his young nephew Luis Egidio Melendez (1716-1780) and supposed he used to work there too. Luis Egidio Melendez was one of the best still-life painters in the world. Among his well-known works, there is a much interesting self-portrait (exhibited at the Louvre) and a series of forty-eight still-life paints ordered in 1771 by the Prince of Asturias, the next King Charles IV who intended to decorate his own private quarters. Thirty-nine are nowadays a part of the Prado Museum’s collection. I’d like to specially focus on one of these called, Servicio de chocolate,…