Antonio Maura

ANTONIO MAURA MONTANER (Mallorca, 1853-1925).
"Ox cart".
Watercolor on paper.
Signed.
Measurements: 10 x 15 cm; 34 x 40 cm (frame).

Antonio Maura, president of the Council of Ministers in five occasions throughout the reign of Alfonso XIII, came from a remarkable family of artists. His siblings were Margarita, Gabriel, Francisco, Miguel, Bartolomé, engraver and painter, member of the AEPE and Francisco, painter and Founding Member of the Association of Painters and Sculptors, Susana, Concepción, Francisca and Catalina. He was a member of the Royal Spanish Academy of Language, the Academy of Jurisprudence and Legislation, the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences and the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. Antonio Maura was a great art lover, a hobby that included the practice of watercolor, of which he left dozens of examples that illustrate corners of Cantabria, where he spent his summer holidays, Castile, or the surroundings of Madrid. Painting served him as an antidote to public life. He presented five watercolors to the I Salón de Otoño organized by the Association of Painters and Sculptors in 1920. In the book "Maura: childhood and youth", Prudencio Rovira y Pita, describes his first watercolors, "very careful in drawing, very shy in color. He had no other models than those that nature offered him, when he faced it, sitting in a country chair, with a block of paper on his knees and a very sharp pencil in his right hand".