Ricardo Anckermann

RICARDO ANCKERMANN RIERA (Palma de Mallorca, 1842 - 1907).
"Characters".
Pencil on paper.
Signed with monogram in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 15 x 9 cm; 29 x 23 cm (frame).

Ricardo Anckermann begins his artistic studies in his native city, under the direction of Fausto Morell. In 1870 he went into voluntary exile, first to Paris, where he worked with Cheret, and later to London. On his return to Spain he studied the works of the museums of Madrid and Valencia. He returns to Mallorca and obtains the position of professor of Natural and Pictorial Anatomy in the School of Fine Arts of Palma, of which he will be director from 1879 until his death. He took part in numerous National Exhibitions, where he obtained several prizes: special honorary mention in 1864, two second class mentions in 1867, and third medal in 1887. He was an academician of San Fernando, and decorated with the crosses of Isabel the Catholic and Alfonso XII. Anckermann is one of the most relevant artistic personalities of the second half of the 19th century in Mallorca, not only for his activity as a painter but also for his work as a promoter of the art market (he created the Promotion of Painting and Sculpture) and as a teacher from the Academy of Palma. As a painter he played an important role in the renovation of the plastic languages of the time, since he brought from his trips abroad new experiences that would mean serious changes in the pictorial panorama, inaugurating new stylistic and iconographic tendencies. Some of his most notable experiences were the introduction of the genre and exotic painting and the revitalization of the landscape, but above all he was interested in his concern for form, especially light and color, elements that were to become an important point of research for almost all local painters. Anckermann's work presents a great complexity, both stylistically and thematically, since he cultivated various trends and pictorial genres simultaneously throughout his life: history painting, mytho-allegorical decoration, anecdotal painting, portraiture, landscape, etc. He is, in a way, the greatest exponent of Mallorcan eclecticism in the second half of the 19th century, although he is also part of realism, although he reduced it to the landscape genre. His works are preserved in the Círculo Mallorquín, the City Hall and the Cathedral of Palma, the Barceló Foundation, the University of Barcelona and the castle of Bendinat. He also decorated the Palacio Gual de Torrella, Son Vida in Palma and the façade of the Teatro Principal in the Balearic capital.