EDUARDO ROSALES

Born in a modest family in Madrid, Eduardo Rosales Gallina managed to obtain a pension in 1859 in order to continue his studies of the art in Rome. This experience introduced some academic features into his first works to which the Nazarethians’ simplicity of forms and colours was added progressively, probably under the influence of his teacher in the Madrid Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, the famous artist Federico de Madrazo. In 1868 he married Maximina Martínez de Pedrosa, whose portrait he painted in a famous canvas in Casón del Buen Retiro in Madrid, and it is exactly the portrait in one of the genres much favoured by the art of Rosales, inspired by his visits to the Museum of Prado, the mastery of Velazquez and the sensual chromatism of the Venetian painting. It was apparently this influence that had an impact on his style of painting based on the constructive touches of a brush that refrains from the inexpressive light colours to gain a uniform modulation in his canvases.

Rosales is an outstanding personality in the Spanish art of the 19th century not only thanks to his portraits but also to his contribution to the historical painting, a genre that was promoted by his Testament of Isabel the Catholic in 1864, and more tragic Death of Lucrecia in 1871, for which he was awarded the golden medal in the National Exposition in the same year. Both canvases are kept now in the above-mentioned Casón. It was because of the decisive influence of Velazquez and not by chance that during his last years he followed the radical compositional force of Edouard Manet whose ascendancy can be traced in his famous portrait The Countess of Santovenia. The fatal illness that took away his life before he was thirty seven made him during the last years of his life change his residence from the Aragon Pyrenees to the Murcia country-side, and in those surroundings he painted typical landscape a plein air. In fact it was his premature death that did not allow him to enjoy relevant offices: the direction of the Museum of Prado during the government of the first republic and that of the Academy of Spain in Rome, founded in 1874.