Agustí Querol

AGUSTIÍ QUEROL I SUBIRATS (Tortosa, 1860–Madrid, 1909).
"Female Bust."
Plaster.
Signed.
Measurements: 50 x 17 x 24 cm.

An exceptional student at the Escuela de la Lonja in Barcelona and under the Vallmitjana brothers, Agustín Querol y Subirats came from a family of bakers and was able to complete his training by winning, with “Saint John Preaching in the Desert,” a scholarship from the Royal Academy in Rome in 1884, serving as a full scholarship recipient until 1888 and as a merit scholar from 1889 to 1893. During this extended stay, he produced significant works, such as “Saint Francis of Assisi Healing the Lepers,” acquired by the Prado Museum and exhibited at the 1895 National Exhibition. Also from his Roman period are “Tulia Stepping Over Her Father’s Corpse” and “The Tradition,” a sculptural group depicting an elderly woman recounting traditions to some children, which represented, above all, a conceptual and expressive breakthrough in sculpture; with it, he participated in the 1887 National Fine Arts Exhibition and won a first-class medal; it also received an award at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. She won her first medal in 1895 for the bust “Tulia”—of which the Prado Museum holds two versions—which she had submitted to the 1890 Munich Exhibition. She received the Medal of Honor at the 1906 Exhibition, where she had presented “La Tradición” and a portrait of “The Princess of Asturias and Sagunto,” a work sent from Rome in 1890, now in the Prado Museum, the plaster cast of which he had exhibited in Munich in 1897. He received significant national and international honors, including, among others, first-class medals at the 1888 Barcelona World’s Fair, at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1889, at the International Exhibitions in Vienna in 1894 and 1898, at the International Exhibition in Berlin in 1896, and at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1900, where he exhibited ten works.
Thanks to his strong personality, he led a realist movement within academic classicism, producing innovative works focused on narrative, expressiveness, and pictorial effects across a large body of work despite his untimely death. He undertook various monumental projects and commissions that required an extremely large studio, and some works remained unfinished. In several cases, he produced duplicate models, some of which met with mixed success, but which included notable contributions, such as the 1892 relief on the pediment of the National Library in Madrid featuring allegories of “Fame,” “Royalty,” the “Muses,” and the “Letters”; the colossal groups crowning the façade of the Ministry of Agriculture; various monuments in Spain’s major capitals, such as those of “Moyano” and “Quevedo” in Madrid, “Casilda Iturrízar” in Bilbao, “Federico Soler” in Barcelona, “Méndez Núñez” in Vigo, or the monument dedicated to the “Siege of Zaragoza,” and others in Cádiz, Santander, or outside Spain, in Manila, Mexico City, or Montevideo; the “General Bolognesi” monument in Lima, the “General Urquiza” in Panama, the “Monument to the Spaniards” in Buenos Aires, or the cemetery in Havana, etc. Gil, in his 1910 biography, lists more than eighty works, not counting replicas, fragments, etc. He sculpted “Alfonso XIII”—a bust that won a gold medal at the Vienna Exhibition in 1894 and was acquired by the Royal Household—the “Queen Regent,” "Ramón y Cajal," "Mauro," and "Canalejas"; he created the head of "Saint Francis," preserved in the Capa Collection and at the Prado Museum, and a "Dolorosa" also at the Prado.