VICENTE CAMARÓN TORRA

Vicente Camarón Torra ( Madrid, 7.4.1803 - Madrid, 2.4.1864 ) is one of the most prominent  representatives of the romantic lanscape painting. Although he dedicated himself to other genres, as we will see later, it is the landscape that he prefers and that gives him the greatest satisfaction. In spite of being known much better in his time than nowadays, he was not one of the most outstanding figures of the Spanish romantism movement. From a professional point of view Vicente Camaron belonged at the same time to the post-war generation of enlightened artists and to the Isabel age. Although he got education in the traditional Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando and his final goal was to be a professor at this institution and a royal painter, it can also be remarked that he was a distinguished member of the Liceo Artístico y Literario Español, one of the cultural societies, alongside with el Casino, el Ateneo, el Círculo de Bellas Arte o la Gran Peña, the most important ones of the new bourgeois organizations. So the artistic life and the biography of Vicente Camaron can serve as an example of the subtle changes in the social life in Spain in the nineteenth century.

Camarón Torra was born on the 7th of April, 1803, in Madrid in the family of Jose Camaron, one of the most prominent painters at the court of Carlos IV. At the age of eleven, on the 5th of october, 1814, he enrolled in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, continuing the family’s artistic tradition. During the War of Independence he got an artistic education according to the canons of the Spanish Enlightenment.

The Death of San Francisco (1780-1790)

After his studies in the Academy of San Fernando the information about Camaron is scarce. We do not know actually anything about the first stage of his creative work. From the scarce information that we have until his nomination as Honorary Member of the above-mentioned Academy in 1844 (he was a professor in the Liceo Artistico y Literario Español and a president of the department of Painting, mounting the exhibitions that were staged by that institution in 1845 and 1846; his fame as a landscape painter and his teaching activity in the Society of Trinity) we can make a conclusion that his studies in the Academy were not very successful and he had to survive thanks to the protection of the new institutions that were created by the bourgeoisie. From a social point of view this unstudied period of his professional life turns out to be a very interesting one, as even if it is true that a famous painter would not have such a career, it is also known that the opportunities which were given by those new institutions to unknown painters allowed to discover with many details the artistic life outside the Court and the development of the artistic market that was more heterogeneous than during the previous centuries. It is also known that he married Josefa Reynaldi on the 31st of December in 1826.

After this “dark” period the most famous part of his professional work can be singled out , starting from his nomination as Honorary Member of the Academy of San Fernando in 1844 that led to his nomination as painter at the court of Isabel II on the 7th of December in 1847. Two years later, on the 7th od January in1849 he was appointed as lecturer of landscape painting to the Academy of San Fernando. In 1854 and 1856 he made attempts to become a professor in this speciality but it is unknown whether he succeeded or not.

A thorough analysis of the pieces of the available information about his professional life will lead us to the conclusion that we deal with a painter recognized by his contemporaries but not a celebrity, because he earned his living in a traditional way (by his teaching in the Academy, appointment to the Royal Court and working privately). Nevertheless the strict system of the ways to become successful created in the eighteenth century and based on a cursus honorum in the Academy of San Fernando and on the orders of the Royal Court was breaking during the nineteenth century. Thus, in the case of Camaron, it can be observed that the new institutions, like Liceo in this case, and new clients, like the Marquis of Santamarca who ordered a number of paintings, succeeded in creating a more heterogeneous market that saved a great number of painters from poverty.

Vicente Camaron Torra’s understanding of art is best represented in his landscape paintings. Influenced by the Dutch landscape painting of the seventeenth century and by the English of his time, the landscape paintings of Camaron, not well studied yet, have a touch of romantism and they are easily recognizable by dark and pale colours. This romantic sensibility of the artist was not appreciated afterwards by the realists and the genius of Camaron was unfairly forgotten.

Besides the landscape paintings Camaron’s artistic activity comprises decoration in fresco of several halls in the Congreso de los Diputados and the Palacio de Aranjuez and the elaborated pictures for the lithographs of great canvases that he realized under the guidance of Jose Madrazo for the “Lithographic Collection of the King of Spain”.

With this official work, teaching activity in the Academy and the landscape paintings made to order Vicente Camaron made a great career that came to an end on the 2nd of April 1864 in Madrid, where he died of a chronic hepatitis.

Claudio Coello 6 28001 Madrid tel. (34) 91 435 0174 galeria@josedelamano.com