PÉREZ VILLAAMIL, Jenaro - b. 1807 El Ferrol, La Coruña, d. 1854 Madrid - WGA

PÉREZ VILLAAMIL, Jenaro

(b. 1807 El Ferrol, La Coruña, d. 1854 Madrid)

Spanish painter and draughtsman. He attended the Colegio Militar in Santiago, Galicia, and then began literary studies in Madrid. After a period as an army officer, he embarked on a career as an artist during a stay in Cadiz, where he had been brought as a prisoner-of-war in 1823. He attended classes at the Academia de Cadiz and soon achieved some fame in the city. In 1830 he was commissioned to decorate the Tapia theatre in the Caribbean city of San Juan in Puerto Rico. In 1833 he returned to Spain and in Seville met the Scottish painter David Roberts, who introduced him to the British Romantic landscape style, in which he then continued to work for the rest of his life.

In 1834 Pérez Villaamil settled in Madrid, taking an active part in the lively artistic world of the Romantic period, and achieving increasing success. In 1835 he was elected an honorary member of the Real Academia de San Fernando. He was also active as an illustrator. In 1837 Pérez Villaamil was among the founders of the Liceo Artístico y Literario Español, where he subsequently obtained high teaching and administrative posts. In 1840 Pérez Villaamil became Pintor Honorario de la Real Cámara, but during the Regency of General Espartero (1840-44) he remained abroad, partly occupied with the publication of his España artística y monumental, a book illustrated with lithographs mainly based on his own drawings. This work, one of the most beautiful lithographed travel books of Spanish Romanticism, with texts by Patricio de la Escosura, was published in Paris in 1842-43.

Pérez Villaamil also travelled in Belgium and the Netherlands, in these countries (as also in France) carrying out commissions for the sovereigns and associating with important political and cultural figures. He received the Légion d’honneur from King Louis-Philippe and was elected a Knight of the Order of Leopold of Belgium. On the fall of Espartero in 1844 Pérez Villaamil returned to Madrid.

In 1845 he was elected Lieutenant Director and Professor of Landscape at the Academia de San Fernando. From 1848 he also taught landscape painting at the Escuela Preparatoria de Ingenieros Civiles y Arquitectos. From this date until his death he made frequent sketching trips to the north of Spain and to Andalusia. He contributed with success to the exhibitions at the Academia and the Liceo, and in 1846 he showed his work at the Paris Salon, where it received high praise from Charles Baudelaire.

Pérez Villaamil’s work may be divided into a pre-Romantic and a Romantic period. His mature painting is full of fantasy: the colouring is warm, brilliant, with golden tones and a vaporous atmosphere enveloping objects and confusing distance. The oil paintings are of small and medium size, with strong drawing and a vigorous impasto technique.

Pérez Villaamil was also a magnificent watercolourist, and a fluent draughtsman, notable for the elegance and strength of his sketches. The most important Spanish Romantic landscape artist, he initiated - through his work as well as his teaching - the systematic cultivation of landscape painting in Spain.

General View of Toledo from the Cross of the Canons

The foreground of the composition presents a cross, inscribed at its base with the date and with the painter’s signature, behind which are depicted a few of the buildings belonging to the convent of the Discalced Trinitarians, no longer standing. Some of the city’s most emblematic monuments can be discerned in the background: on a hill to the left, San Servando castle and Alc�ntara bridge over the Tagus river; on the mountainside, the Alc�zar fortress, the tower of the Cathedral and the Jesuit’s dome; and lower down to the right, the Bisagra Door (also known as Door of Charles V) bearing the emperor’s coat of arms. Everything appears bathed in the golden light of dusk and the remoteness is enveloped in a diaphanous atmosphere that confers the impression of mystery the painter captured so well. The light is emphasised by the spirited use of thick impasto brushstrokes. This is one of the best and more typical works of his early Romantic phase, which begun in 1833 under the influence of the Scottish painter David Roberts.

Send Postcard Learn More

The Benavente Chapel at Medina de Rioseco

One of the most fascinating aspects of P�rez Villaamil’s oeuvre is his monumental interiors, of which he was a master in his day. He set a fashion for this genre, which was popular with his bourgeois clientele. Seduced by the roaming spirit of the European Romantic painters which he learned from his master, David Roberts, and in keeping with the Romantic zeal for rediscovering monumental testaments to the past with a concern for both documentary and picturesque aspects, Villaamil travelled around Spain recording everything interesting he found in drawings and sketches. His findings were later incorporated – as in this case – into studio paintings.

Known as the “Sistine Chapel of Valladolid” for its decoration, this chapel, one of the most outstanding examples of 16th-century Castilian religious architecture, was built at the behest of the money changer �lvaro de Benavente by the architect Juan del Corral and his brother the sculptor Jer�nimo del Corral. The building work began on 21 March 1544 and was completed two years later. The overwhelmingly profuse decoration, which completely covers the chapel, must have dazzled P�rez Villaamil, who attempted to capture its ornamental richness in this view of the entrance from the apse.

Send Postcard Learn More

Village Bullfight

A bullfight is being held on an area of level ground outside the walls of a village beneath the imposing silhouette of the grandiose, monumental parish church with the appearance of a collegiate church that towers majestically above the scene on a small hillock.

The bullfight takes place in the centre of the ring, which is formed by wagons arranged in a circle. Watched by a bustling crowd, a picador is about to weaken the bull with his lance, while other bullfighters around him perform distracting manoeuvres. On the balcony of the building that stands out from the group of houses on the right is the presidential box in which the black-clad local authorities can be distinguished. Locals are grouped around the cross erected at the boundary stone on that side to gain a better view of the action. Meanwhile, visible in the foreground is the motley crowd of friars, country folk, ladies riding in open-topped caleches, stallholders, musicians and street vendors who take part in the festivities.

Here Villaamil puts his best skills to work in producing a monumental picturesque landscape, a genre of which he was the absolute master in Spanish painting of his day. He displays his inventive flair to the full in recreating the appearance of a non-existent village with an astonishing scenographic effect, overlooked by the impressive architecture of a church built from remnants of real architectural features that Villaamil would have sketched during his travels around Spain, later combining them in his studio with a curious eclecticism steeped in the most genuine Romantic spirit to give them a lifelike appearance.

Send Postcard Learn More