Descripción
RICARDO LÓPEZ CABRERA
1864 – 1950 Portraits of Spanish peasants. Two pendant paintings.
Beautiful pair of oil paintings on wood, Spanish school, Ricardo Lopez Cabrera. They are in excellent condition. painted on wood and with their original ebonized frames.
Painting measurements: 30cm x 19 cm (12” x 7.5”) framed measurements 51cm x 38cm (20” x 15”). The frames have some minimal details typical of their age.
The great quality of the artist can be seen in the faces and details of the characters portrayed.
Ricardo López Cabrera (Cantillana, September 28, 1864-Seville, January 7, 1950), was a Spanish painter who trained at the School of Fine Arts of Seville, with his teachers being Eduardo Cano and José Jiménez Aranda.
Biography:
After his first period in Seville, in 1887 he moved to Rome to continue his studies, thanks to a competition called by the Provincial Council of Seville to fill a pensioner’s place, which he won. There he remained four years. “The mastery of drawing and the study of perspective were one of his main artistic concerns, always within a rigorous academic spirit.”1 An example of this is his work Gladiator (1888), which is on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Seville. “Figure, in life size, of a victorious gladiator of the Roman circus.” He appears naked, showing his muscles. He also painted some landscapes in Venice in these years outside of Spain.
Returning to his hometown, he married Rosario, daughter of Jiménez Aranda, on October 2, 1895, who began to work as his teacher at this time, in which he enjoyed prestige. He made a work in the house of the Marquises of Angulo, in the bedroom, on whose ceiling he represented The Apotheosis of the Arts, in 1899. In 1906 he was appointed member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Santa Isabel of Hungary in Seville. .
In 1909 he settled in Argentina, due to the lack of commercial possibilities for his work in the capital of Seville, residing in the city of Córdoba until 1923. During this period he combined his artistic activity with teaching at the School of Fine Arts. He preferred this city to settle in Buenos Aires (axis of artistic culture) because of its calmness, since, as his son expresses, he “fled whenever he could from the traffic of big cities. These grated on his nerves.”
In February 1923 he returned to Spain, dedicating five years to painting fifteen triptychs on traditional themes from the different Spanish regions: Andalusia, Aragon, Asturias, the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands, New Castile, Old Castile, Catalonia, Extremadura, Galicia, León, Murcia, Navarra, Valencia and the Basque Country. Each triptych consists of a central canvas, almost square, measuring 1.25 x 1.50 m and two smaller lateral ones of 1.10 x 0.85, all of which are painted naturally, without photographs or professional models, in their places of origin. It was called by him “the work”, to which he gave so much importance that in order to finance it he sometimes had to make exhibitions and portraits for sale. All together they measure 48 meters long. “The central canvases corresponding to the two archipelagos – the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands – represent landscapes, without any human figure. All the others collect figures of men and women with popular clothing from their respective regions, on typical backgrounds, indoors or outdoors.”
He remained in Spain until his death in Seville on January 7, 1950 at the age of 85, although in these last years of his life he had health problems (senile dementia) that kept him away from painting.
His artistic production includes a wide range of themes, in his first stage he deals with everything from the theme of customs or “casacones”, to portraiture and landscape, including various works made on the Andalusian coast of Rota and Chipiona, with themes of fishermen, clearly being Sorolla’s influence is perceptible in these works.
In his mature stage, regional themes and landscapes predominated, especially those of Alcalá de Guadaira on the outskirts of Seville.