Genaro Pérez Villaamil

GENARO PÉREZ VILLAAMIL Y DUGUET (El Ferrol, La Coruña, 1807 - Madrid, 1854).
"Las Huelgas. La Claustrilla".
Crayon and charcoal on paper.
Preparatory drawing for the book "Artistic and Monumental Spain" (Paris, 1842).
Signed in the lower margin.
Size: 15.5 x 19 cm; 37 x 51 cm (frame).
Between 1840 and 1844, Pérez Villaamil travelled around Europe, residing for a time in Paris, where he published his "Artistic and Monumental Spain", considered one of the most beautiful lithographed travel books of Spanish Romanticism. The lithographs came out in 1842 in three volumes, with landscape themes and the most outstanding monuments of Spain. The sole author of the drawings was Genaro, and the author of the texts was Patricio de la Escosura. It was sponsored by the Marquis of Remisa. Pérez Villaamil was the creator and leading representative of Spanish Romantic landscape painting. In 1823 he joined the army of the Liberal government, was wounded in Andalusia and was taken to Cadiz as a prisoner of war. He remained there from 1823 to 1830 and attended classes at the Academy of Fine Arts. Prono achieved fame, and was called to Puerto Rico to decorate the Tapia Theatre. He returned to Spain in 1833, the year in which he met the Scottish painter David Roberts, who passed on to him the British Romantic landscape conception to which he remained faithful throughout his life. In 1834 he settled in Madrid, where he took an active part in the artistic world of the Romantic period, achieving a career of growing success. In 1835 he was appointed academician of merit of San Fernando, and five years later, honorary chamber painter. He travelled around France, Belgium and Holland, and the kings of these countries acquired his works. On the fall of Espartero he returned to Spain and was made a knight of the Order of Charles III, of Leopold of Belgium and of the French Legion of Honour. In 1845 he was appointed director of the San Fernando Academy and professor of landscape painting there. He regularly and successfully attended the exhibitions of the Academy and the Lyceum, as well as the Paris Salon where, in 1846, he was praised by Charles Baudelaire. He died at a young age, when the Romantic landscape conceptions were already in decline. His work has a first pre-Romantic period (1823 - 1833), during which he produced youthful, somewhat eclectic works, oscillating between the influence of 17th-century Flemish and 18th-century French painting, but always within a broad conception of landscape, with small popular figures and romantic celestial landscapes. The second stage, the Romantic, was in line with contemporary British landscape painting, marked by the predominance of views with architectural motifs enveloped in spectacular celapses and interiors of monuments with a fantastic atmosphere, all of them generally medieval and populated by popular figures. He was also a pioneer in Spain in the introduction of Orientalist themes. Important works by him are kept in the Museo del Prado, the Moncloa Palace (Patrimonio Nacional), the Museo Romántico in Madrid and the Museo de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires.