Jenaro Pérez Villaamil

JENARO PÉREZ VILLAAMIL Y DUGUET (El Ferrol, La Coruña, 1807 - Madrid, 1854).
"Arab souk".
Watercolor on paper.
Signed on the back.
Measurements: 17 x 23 cm; 26.5 x 30 cm (frame).

Perez Villaamil was the creator and maximum representative of the Spanish romantic landscape painting. In 1823 he joins the army of the liberal government, being wounded in Andalusia and transferred to Cadiz as prisoner of War. He remained there between 1823 and 1830, and attended classes at the Academy of Fine Arts. Prono achieves fame, and is called to Puerto Rico to decorate the Tapia Theater. He returns to Spain in 1833, year in which he meets the Scottish painter David Roberts, who transmits him the British romantic landscape conception, to which he will remain faithful all his life. In 1834 he settled in Madrid, where he actively participated in the artistic world of the Romantic period, achieving a career of growing success. In 1835 he was named academician of merit of San Fernando, and five years later, honorary chamber painter. Between 1840 and 1844 he remained outside Spain, and in Paris he published his "Artistic and Monumental Spain", the most beautiful lithographed travel book of Spanish romanticism. He traveled through France, Belgium and Holland, and the kings of these countries acquired his works. At the fall of Espartero he returns to Spain, and is named knight of the Order of Carlos III, of Leopold of Belgium and of the French Legion of Honor. In 1845 he was appointed director of the Academy of San Fernando and professor of landscape in the same. He attended regularly, with success, the exhibitions of the Academy and the Lyceum, as well as the Paris Salon where, in 1846, he received a critical acclaim from Charles Baudelaire. He died still young, when the romantic landscape conceptions were already in decline. His work has a first pre-Romantic stage (1823 - 1833), during which he made youthful works somewhat eclectic, oscillating between the influence of Flemish painting of the XVII and the French of the XVIII, but always within a broad conception of the landscape, with small popular figures and romantic celajes. The second stage, the romantic one, was in line with contemporary British landscape painting, marked by the predominance of views with architectural motifs wrapped in spectacular celapses, and interiors of monuments with a fantastic atmosphere, all of them generally medieval and populated by popular characters. He was also a pioneer in Spain in the introduction of orientalist themes. Important works of his are preserved in the Prado Museum, the Moncloa Palace (National Heritage), the Romantic Museum of Madrid and the Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires.