Gonzalo Bilbao

GONZALO BILBAO MARTINEZ (Seville, 1860 - Madrid, 1938).
Untitled.
Oil on canvas. Relined.
Attached certificate of authenticity issued by Mr. Gerardo Pérez-Calero.
Signed in the lower left corner.
Measurements: 47 x 39 cm.
Gonzalo Bilbao begins in the drawing since he was a child and in 1880 he begins his pictorial career. During these years he made a trip to Italy and France with Jiménez de Aranda. In Rome he worked with the painter José Villegas Cordero, and traveled through the different Italian capitals, painting urban and rural views until his return to Spain in 1884. In the following years he visited Rome again, traveled through Spain and also went to Morocco, Paris and Munich. In Spain he worked as a professor of painting, at first as a private individual and, from 1903, as successor to Jiménez de Aranda at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Santa Isabel de Hungría in Seville. In 1904 he married and took up residence in Madrid, where he continued his teaching work at the San Fernando Academy. During his career he participated in numerous exhibitions of fine arts, both national and foreign, being awarded a third medal at the Universal Exhibition of Paris (1889) and the International Exhibition of Barcelona (1891), a single medal at the Universal Exhibition of Chicago (1893), and a gold medal at the International Exhibitions of Berlin (1899), Munich (1905), Buenos Aires (1910), Santiago de Chile (1910), San Francisco (1915) and Panama (1916). He also participated in the National Fine Arts, obtaining second medal in 1887 and 1892, first in 1899 and 1901 and honor in 1915. A traditional painter, representative of Spanish costumbrismo, he expressed in his paintings colorful pictures of Andalusian life and its most popular characters, and also practiced the landscape, the figure and the portrait, painting prominent figures of the time as King Alfonso XIII and the actress Carmen Diaz. The light and vitality of his compositions bring his language closer to impressionist aesthetics, focusing on the essential representation of environments and landscapes. Gonzalo Bilbao is represented in the Museum of Fine Arts in Seville, where he has a room entirely dedicated to his work, the Prado Museum, the Jaume Morera Museum in Lleida and the Museum of Fine Arts in Cordoba, among others, as well as in private collections both in Spain and abroad.