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Jose Villegas y Cordero, The Slipper Merchant, 1872, Oil on
Canvas, 19 x 25.6 in., The Walters Art
Museum, Baltimore
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Jose Villegas, Ladies in a Garden, Oil on Canvas, 16.93 x
22.83 in., Private Collection
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| Jose Villegas, The Tennis Player (Pablo Ramos Villegas, the Artist’s nephew), 1905, Oil on Canvas, 74 ¾ x 35 ½ in., Private Collection |
Jose Villegas y Cordero (1844-1921), for example, was a very accomplished painter who served as Director of The Prado from 1901 to 1918. He had a fine sense of color and could draw extremely well, thanks to rigorous academic training.
Villegas y Cordero began his studies in his early teens at the School of Fine
Arts in his native Seville. When he was 23, a patron sent him off to Madrid
to study with Federico Madrazo, a member of the illustrious Madrazo family of
painters. Many years later, Villegas was
to follow his mentor as Director of The Prado.
Federico, in turn, had succeeded his father, Jose de Madrazo y Agudo, who
served as Director of the Prado from 1838 to 1851. I’m getting unjustly sidetracked here by
associated data, but the Madrazo family also includes Federico’s son, Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta
(1841–1920), the most well-known of the formidable Spanish painting clan and one of my favorite painters.
In Madrid,
Villegas made frequent trips to The Prado to copy Velazquez, whose work
inspired him to develop a loose and spontaneous manner of painting, according
to his biographers. Villegas also
admired the exuberant brushwork and Orientalist works of another teacher,
Mariano Fortuny y Marsal (1838-1874).
Villegas went on sketching trips to Morocco
to gather material for his own Orientalist paintings. For a number of years, he had a very
successful career in Rome and Venice,
painting Orientalist, History and Italian Renaissance themes. In Rome,
Villegas inherited the mantle of Fortuny, who died in Rome
from a malarial fever he contracted while plein air painting in the summer of
his 36th and last year of life. By the
way, Fortuny was married to Federico Madrazo’s daughter, Cecilia, in case you
didn’t know. There was a lot of social
networking among painters in the 19th Century.
One of Villegas’ Orientalist paintings online is The Slipper Merchant, which is in the collection of The Walters Art
Museum in Baltimore. The Museum has this to say about the
painting: “In the dimly lit, richly
colored interior of a North African shop, a turbaned merchant serves a customer
seated on a divan. Kneeling in front is an attendant, and barely discernible in
the background is a craftsman at work. To the left, a man smokes a hookah.
Villegas has adopted a subject made popular by Mariano Fortuny, but rather than
exploring light effects, he provides an almost overwhelmingly detailed array of
bric-a-brac. Even the picture frame, custom-ordered for this painting, is
inscribed in Naskh script: "There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his
Prophet."
Near the end of his very successful career in Rome,
Villegas was named Director of the Spanish
Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. Two years later he left for Madrid
to become Director of The Prado.
I wonder what the museums would be like today if painters
still called the shots, rather than medieval tapestry scholars and the like,
who have to behave like high-end carnival barkers to pull in the crowds. All the old painters I’ve met remember the
halcyon days when they had the painting galleries all to themselves whenever
they visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wouldn’t it be nice to return to those golden
days of yore? Fighting through hoards of
bewildered, bored and bellicose tourists is pure torture for any lover of
painting.
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| Mario Fortuny, The Odalisque, 1861, Oil on Cardboard, 22.4 x 31.9 in., Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona |
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Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta (1841-1920), Fond Memories, Oil
on Canvas, 32 x 36 in., Private Collection
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