Bartolomé Pérez de la Dehesa

BARTOLOMÉ PÉREZ DE LA DEHESA (Madrid, ca. 1634-1698).
"Floreros".
Oil on canvas. Relined.
Attached report of Don Enrique Valdivieso.
They present faults in the pictorial surface.
Measurements: 98 x 76 cm (x2); 122 x 99 cm (frames, x2).
We are in front of two works by Bartolomé Pérez de la Dehesa, with the same subject matter. In both paintings the vases are filled with dense and varied bouquets of flowers of cheerful colors, made from dense brushstrokes. Of marked verticality, these are imaginative compositions that prelude the arrival of the Rococo, in which symmetry is broken with and tends to horror vacui. In them, the flowers still appear full, voluminous, in all their splendor, as will be typical of the baroque (in the rococo, however, the flowers will be preferred half-open, not so full). However, the vases are placed in the strict center of the painting, contained in elaborate vases, on pedestals and against a dark background on which the flowers are cut out, vividly illuminated. However, the arrangement of the flowers has already lost the strict rigor and austerity of the naturalistic baroque. Luminously, the fact that the artist has concentrated the light-colored flowers in a single point stands out, thus turning the luminous flowers into chromatic highlights that stand out in the composition and attract the viewer's attention.
Specializing in the floral genre, Dehesa achieved unusual mastery in this type of work. This painter from Madrid received numerous court commissions. Bartolomé Pérez Dehesa trained with Juan de Arellano, who later became his father-in-law when he married his daughter Juana in 1663. He specialized in painting flowers and garlands, the latter including religious scenes and depictions of saints. The Prado Museum has twenty-three works of this type from the royal collection, the Museum of the Trinity and the donation of the duchess widow of Pastrana in 1889. He excelled as a decorative painter, participating in the ornamentation of the ephemeral arches made for the entrance of Queen Maria Luisa de Orleans, first wife of Charles II, in 1679 and in the scenographies for the theaters of the Alcazar and the Buen Retiro. These works earned him the appointment of painter of the king on January 22, 1689. Months later, he began to execute fifty-five paintings of flowers on the panels with gilded backgrounds of the walls and ceiling of the so-called "Camón dorado" of Charles II in the Alcázar of Madrid, of which only one painting is preserved in a private collection.