Gonzalo Bilbao

GONZALO BILBAO MARTÍNEZ (Seville, 1860- Madrid, 1938).
"Andalusian landscape".
Oil on canvas.
It has restorations and Repainting. It has damages in the frame.
Attached certificate issued by Mr. Gerardo Pérez Calero.
It presents damages in the frame.
Signed in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 90 x 141 cm; 96.5 x 148 cm (frame).
The landscape was one of the genres in which Gonzalo Bilbao cultivated more, in such a way that his work reflects a wide variety that goes from maritime, fluvial and terrestrial views, adapting pictorially diverse locations that depart from the Andalusian field, to the city of Morocco. Sometimes populated by characters, while others are desolate as in this painting. His mastery and intense landscape activity involved a great mastery of the technique, being a master in capturing light and atmosphere. This work is a clear example of the aforementioned, since the author captures a specific moment of the day, placing a slight orange stripe in the center of the horizon line, indicating that it is sunset, which can also be guessed through the darkened treatment of the architectural element of the scene.
Gonzalo Bilbao started drawing as a child and in 1880 he began 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 Museo de Bellas Artes in Seville, where he has a room entirely dedicated to his work, the Museo del Prado, the Jaume Morera in Lleida and the Museo de Bellas Artes in Cordoba, among others, as well as in private collections both in Spain and abroad.