GABRIEL DE LA CORTE

Gabriel de la Corte was a son of the unknown but promising painter Francisco de la Corte, who was working in Antequera, a brother of Juan de la Corte (1597-1660) who was also a painter and one of the rare known students of Velázquez; he was famous for depicting fights and mythological scenes, and, according to other sources and principally to Ceán Bermúdez, he could really be Gabriel’s father. As Palomino stated in his work Spanish Laureate Parnassus of Painters, published in Madrid in 1724 as the third and the last part of the Museum of Painting and Optic Scale, Gabriel de la Corte was an artist who was not very successful and who lived in poverty, specializing in the painting of vases, baskets, garlands and signboards, that he had learned to paint without help of any teacher, if it is really true that his father was Juan de la Corte, who died when Gabriel was only twelve years old.

He just copied and essentially assimilated the best of Juan de Arellano’s and Bartolomé Pérez’s paintings depicting flowers. At the same time his technique differs from theirs by a more decorative and ornamental tendency, that he achieved due to the combination, in his most successful works, of a sharp drawing and a remarkable easiness in the use of the brush, alternating dabbed zones with the finest gauze that gives the subtle impression of the freshness of the flowers. It should not be forgotten that the painting of flowers came into vogue during the last decades of the 17th century, taking such a distinguished position away from the paintings of fruits and, above all, grapes, that was very fashionable at the beginning of the century. In this context Gabriel was selling his works “on account of the necessity”, as Palomino put it, at a very low price, and some of the Madrid painters of that time charged him with the job of helping them in their minor works. Among those painters there were Antonio de Castrejón and Matías de Torres, whose bright techniques, a bit sketchy and casual, could have influenced De la Corte’s later canvases.

He died in Madrid in 1694, and was buried in the churchyard of San Sebastian, scarcely able to live on the scanty income from the sale of his works.