Follower of Francisco de Zurbarán

Follower of FRANCISCO DE ZURBARÁN (Fuente de Cantos, Badajoz, 1598 - Madrid, 1664); second half of the 18th century.
"Saint with still life".
Oil on canvas. Relined.
It has a frame of the nineteenth century.
Measurements: 119 x 94 cm; 131 x 104 cm (frame).
This work presents a monk seated in solitude in front of a table, arranged in front, in an attitude of recollection. The scene is articulated around a sober and silent composition, in which the values of containment and spirituality that characterize the Spanish school of the Golden Age, and in particular the influence of Francisco de Zurbarán, predominate. The obvious model is the painting of St. Hugo in the refectory (Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla), from which this painting picks up not so much the compositional literalness as the meditative and ascetic essence.
The monk appears isolated in an almost stripped environment, accompanied only by a simple table on which rest a round loaf of bread and a white earthenware jug, arranged with precision. The painting, far from being a mere copy, reinterprets Zurbarán's legacy with fidelity to the original spirit, highlighting the permanence of a pictorial language deeply rooted in the mysticism of the Spanish Baroque.
On a formal level, the author of our canvas also shows himself to be a direct heir of the master, whose work he must have known well, surely first hand. Zurbarán was a painter of simple realism, excluding grandiloquence and theatricality from his work, and we can even find some clumsiness when solving the technical problems of geometric perspective, despite the perfection of his drawing in anatomies, faces and objects. Nor is he interested in foreshortenings or the suggestion of illusionistic spaces in the Italian style. Here we see something similar, a magnificently worked figure, totally protagonist, in contrast. Also in the compositional aspect he is close to Zurbarán, not only because he follows his models, but also because of the severity and rigorous order, which reaches an exceptional level of pious emotion. With respect to tenebrism, the painter practiced it mainly in his first Sevillian period, both in his well-known monastic works and in pieces for private devotion. This first period is the one to which the author of our painting is close, both in his subject matter and in his formal values. He is also close to the master in his exceptional technique, which allows him to represent the tactile values of the canvases and objects. We therefore see a work close to the master in its sobriety, the expressive force and the plasticity of his figure, characteristics that placed Zurbarán at the summit of the Spanish masters of the Golden Age and that made him the Baroque master who most moves our modern sensibility.