Ignacio Zuloaga

The painter Ignacio Zuloaga was an offspring of an old Basque family of armorers and first learned to draw in their workshop. At first, he copied paintings in Madrid’s Prado Museum. After a short stay in Rome, he trained partly self-taught in Paris. He pursued his studies mainly in the Louvre but also attended the Free Academy and later the Academy La Palette. In Paris, he became friends with, for instance, Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), Edgar Degas (1834-1917), and the poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898). In 1890, Zuloaga presented his work La forja at the Salon des Artistes Français, which received very positive reviews.

In the early 1890s, in Andalusia, he became acquainted with the life and culture of the gypsies and even tried to become a bullfighter. On his extended honeymoon, he painted portraits of members of British society in London. The desire to get to know painter El Greco (1541-1614) thoroughly, led him to Castile. Soon after his return to Paris, he went to Italy again. This was followed by studies in Granada. Since then, Zuloaga lived alternately in various Spanish cities and Paris, but mostly in the Basque fishing village of Zumaya, where he had a house built for himself. Between 1916 and 1917 he undertook an intensive exhibition tour of the USA. During the Spanish Civil War, the painter may have initially leaned toward the Republicans, but soon switched to the Francist side and painted Franco in 1940.

Besides El Greco, Zuloaga was also influenced by Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) and especially Francisco de Goya (1746-1828), whose true successor he is considered. A powerful colorist and keen observer, he was a vivid depictor of the native folk in his immense body of work. He was the historian of the gradually disappearing Old Spain.