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Bernardo Lorente Germán got his first basic knowledge of painting from his father, a painter himself, and Cristóbal López, an artist who made his fortune by selling the canvases to the North and South America. When Felipe V and Isabel de Farnesio were staying in Seville, he had a chance to make acquaintances in the Court and to portray the infant Don Felipe, future Duke of Parma (1730) in a picture that was inevitably under the influence of French painter Jean Ranc. He did not want to remain at the Court when he returned to Madrid in 1733; it was probably his melancholic and reserved temperament that prevented him from triumphing and discovering his true talent. This is at least that was told by Ceán in the Historical Dictionary of 1800, the story which was rightly criticized by Jose Milicua in his thorough study (Spanish File of Art, 1961, pp. 313-320).
In Seville he was painting the local aristocracy, and his canvases reflects the prevailing French taste of that time, and also the one influenced by Murillo, whose forms, light as a cotton, and whose pastel colours, really gorgeous, contributed to the perfection achieved by Lorente Germán in his canvas Divine Shepherdess inspired by Ceán Bermúdez. This painting represents the Virgin, pasturing cattle in the field. He was respectful of the Capuchins, since Brother Isidoro of Seville, to whom the Virgin appeared in that manner, belonged to that order. It is known for sure that Miguel Alonso de Tovar was the first to paint this iconographic canvas that appeared in Seville in 1703, in spite of the fact that is was Lorente Germán who managed the distribution and the fortune of the Virgin Shepherdess. It is thanks to that canvas that he was recognized as the Painter of the Shepherdesses, the most famous example being that of Alcolea del Río, made in 1742, now disappeared, although it was not the only type of canvases he painted. His most well-known works are kept in the Cartesian abbey of Jerez de la Frontera and granted to some churches of Úbeda and Baeza, some of them were sold as Murillo’s originals. Thanks to his fame he was appointed one of the first members of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in 1756. Among the most precious examples of this collection one can distinguish still life and genre scenes, and above all his trompe-l'oeil paintings that were a real success, as well as various canvases with religious motifs, such as San Miguel Archangel that is kept now in the gallery.
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