Life and work of Carlos Espinosa (Alicante, 1758 - After 1818) seems original within the framework of the panorama of the Spanish painters of the XVIII century for two reasons which we shall highlight: his becoming an artist that fell basically on the years of his stay in Italy and the difficulties that the deep historical changes he lived through (French Revolution, Napoleonic wars, the disruption of the enlightened absolutism...) provoked in his career.
The youth and the first pictorial apprenticeship of Carlos Espinosa, son of Agustín Espinosa, a painter, totally accorded with the criteria of the enlightened Madrid of that period. Thus in 1773, being fifteen years old, he becomes a student of the Saint Ferdinand Royal Academy in Madrid, where during his studies, he will win three prizes in the contests held by the Academy. At the same time, from 1773 till 1776, he attended to the studio of Francisco Bayeu, |
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Portrait of José Esteban de Mendizabal y Mayorá (?) (1780) |
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one of the most significant painters of that period. Through Bayeu, Espinosa will meet Anton Raphel Mengs, his teacher, who will have no small share in framing his artistic career and his destiny. In the Mengs’s trip to Rome, Carlos Espinosa was one of the painters who accompanied and lived with him in Italy. The reliance of Mengs upon Espinosa’s skill, as is evidenced in the preserved documentation, must have been so enormous that he paid him allowance out of his own pocket for his maintenance in the Roman capital.
The relations of the official Hispanic art with Italy and, above all, of his most famous institution, the Saint Ferdinand Academy of Fine Arts, were very important during the second half of the XVIII century. These relations were maintained through the key figure of Francisco Preciado de la Vega. However, with the trip of Mengs and his disciples, these relations were altered radically. A group of young Spanish painters, among them Espinosa, traveled to Rome on the immediate instructions of the Bohemian painter who, in its turn, controlled his education in the Eternal City. Thus, Espinosa’s training centered on copying classic models, masterpieces of painting and the nude.
This discordant principle, out of Preciado’s control, disappeared with Anton Mengs's premature death in 1779. From this moment on and in spite of the fact that it was through Francisco Preciado that Espinosa was granted necessary prolongation of his allowance that supported him in Rome, Espinosa went over to the Italian circles. He frequented Pompeo Batoni’s studio that was rather far from the pictorial Hispanic realities. Thus, the link with Spain was preserved through such prominent figures as José Nicolás de Azara, which can be proved with the participation of Espinosa, with two big oils, in the Roman obsequies of Carlos III or with the picture Beato Sebastián de Aparicio painted for the cardinal Antonio Despuig.
However, after the outbreak of the French Revolution, the link breaks and it results in agglomeration of a whole series of explanatory reasons that make Espinosa’s return to the Spanish court impossible. The first of these motives was the Revolution itself and its consequences that provoked such a drastic general changes that they influenced the physical preservation of the monarchies of the Former Regime and eventually its own cultural policy: that was not an appropriate time for cultivation of art. Secondly, the very "peripheral" situation of Espinosa (out of Spain in a convulsed Italy, with different pictorial approaches, etc.) did not make for an easier return. Espinosa’s protectors, mainly Azara, followed a political path rather incongruous with the desires of Godoy, who controlled the Hispanic politics till 1808, which finally prevented Espinosa’s return.
All these factors united against Carlos Espinosa, who had to move to Florence in 1798, after the Jacobean revolution in Rome. Even there, in 1808, he was obliged to go to France, after being detained by the French troops. After the Napoleonic wars he returned to Florence and later he moved to Rome. So, we face an interesting example of how hostilities interfere with a possible artistic career.
When he has settled in Rome and after his former protectors disappear from the political life, Espinosa will tie his future to the figures of the king’s parents, the exiled Carlos IV and Maria Luise of Parma. Although from a political point of view his stake was clearly a failure, he had no other choice. In Rome he portrays Carlos and Maria Luise and, on January 10, 1818, he requests Fernando VII, unsuccessfully, to be the director of the Spanish pensions in Rome that are maintained with the help of allowances. He will not manage, either, to be nominated Pintor de Cámara del Rey (Royal Chamber Painter) with a salary, in spite of the petition drawn up on September 15 of the said year. Though on October 5, 1817 he was designated as an Honorary Academician of the Saint Lucas Academy in Rome.
These failed attempts to return to the Peninsula are the last information that we have about Carlos Espinosa who must have died a little later, probably in Rome. Thus, the uneasy times he lived through affected his artistic career, which in normal circumstances might have ended "comfortably", among the Royal Chamber Painters.
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