Juan Gálvez Rodríguez
Pedro de Galvez, ehemals zugeschrieben
Kopf eines weißbärtigen Mannes, 1790 - 1846
This sheet was formerly attributed to a Pedro de Gálvez, of whom nothing further was known. In Echeverría's inventory, only the artist's last name and the name of his teacher are mentioned (no. 28, "Escuela Española”): “By Gálvez, pupil of Señor Maella."
Juan Gálvez Rodríguez worked for Charles IV at El Escorial, in Aranjuez, and at the Palacio Real in Madrid. He had studied in Madrid at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando with Mariano Salvador Maella, who became a close friend. In 1815 he became court painter (Pintor de Cámara) to King Fernando VII. Beginning in 1814, he was employed at the Academy in Madrid, and in 1826 he took over the post of director of painting, vacant since the death of Maella, and finally in 1838 he was named director general for painting.[1]
In 1808 he had journeyed with Fernando Brambila (1763-1834)[2] to Zaragoza, where they met Francisco de Goya. They proposed to document the Ruins of Saragossa following the battle against the French and thus the heroism of the Spanish troops.[3] Brambila, who would become " profesor de perspectiva" at the Academy in Madrid in 1814, was responsible for the architecture and landscapes; Gálvez for the portraits. With relative frequency, Gálvez included sharply chiseled profiles like the one on the Hamburg sheet.[4] Moreover, the present work employs a palette with cooler tones that are unquestionably indebted to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Francisco Bayeu, or indeed Maella; however, in its search for three-dimensionality the drawing already exhibits obvious Romantic features.[5]
Jens Hoffmann-Samland
1 Allgemeines Künstlerlexicon, vol. 48 (2006), 194; Garcia Sepúlveda and Navarrete Martínez 2007, 167-68.
2 Between 1791 and 1798, Brambila had participated in the expedition of Alessandro Malaspina along with Pedro del Pozo (see inv. no. 38604, cat. no. 131). The latter's weaker artistic skills led to his replacement by Brambila. See Sotos Serrano 1982, 99.
3 The series of thirty-six etchings was published beginning in 1812 in Cádiz, which was not yet occupied by France; see Sotos Serrano 1982, 269, Documento 312v, 2.3.1811, and Vega 1992, 235-37. More recently, Contento Márquez 2010.
4 Sotos Serrano 1982, 114.
5 R. Contento Márquez employed similar terms in his discussion of the panel painting of the "outstanding colorist" Juan Gálvez; see Allgemeines Künstlerlexicon, vol. 48 (2006), 195.