Rafael Tegeo

Rafael Tegeo Díaz (Caravaca de la Cruz, November 27, 1798-Madrid, October 3, 1856) was a Spanish painter halfway between the neoclassical tradition and the new romantic current.

Rafael Facundo Texedor Díaz may appear in documents of the time as Texeo, Texedor, Tejeo or Tegeo, among others. This last form is the most common in historiography, because it was the one that the author himself used most profusely in the signature of his paintings and that appears engraved on his tomb, in the San Isidro cemetery in Madrid.

Biography

Son of Pedro Luis Texedor and María Ana Díaz, he moved to Murcia in 1813 thanks to the patronage of the Marquis of San Mamés. In the Economic Society of Friends of the Country of said town he would begin his artistic training with teachers such as the sculptor Santiago Baglietto.

Shortly later, in 1818, he moved to Madrid to study at the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. There he was educated in neoclassical painting from the Alicante-born José Aparicio. He also worked helping Fernando Brambilla, an Italian living in Spain and chamber painter to King Ferdinand VII. In this way, Tegeo became familiar with decorative and landscape painting, themes that would be fundamental for his later works.

In 1822 he traveled to Rome on his own, where he remained until 1827. These years brought him influences from the great masters of the Cinquecento, as well as the paths of late Italian Neoclassicism. From this period, the Virgen del Jilguero stands out, acquired in 2017 by the Museum of Romanticism.

Upon his return to Spain in 1828, he was named honorary member of the Royal Academy of San Fernando, where he held various positions throughout his career. On the occasion of his entry, he created one of his great mythological works: Hercules and Antaeus. For a time it was dated around 1828, because this was the painting with a historical theme that he promised to make to enter the Academy upon his return from Italy, but today we know that it took a long time and in 1835 they were still demanding it (he finished it one year later).

The 1930s of the 19th century were the artist's years of splendor, in which he made decorations for the Casino de the Queen, the Vista Alegre Palace and the Royal Palace of Madrid. In these same years he received important commissions from the infant Sebastian Gabriel, for whom he produced several works, both religious and mythological, Antílochus brings Achilles the news of the battle over the corpse of Patroclus (private collection) and < i>Diomedes, assisted by Minerva, wounds Mars (Museum of Fine Arts of Murcia). Another fundamental mythological work within Tegeo's production will be Battle of Lapitas and Centaurs.

At the same time, Tegeo established himself as one of the most famous portrait painters in the prevailing bourgeois society of Spanish romanticism. With a conception capable of integrating the 18th century tradition, his outdoor portraits were undoubtedly the most appreciated, combining in them a deep attention to the psychological dimension of the models. In 1846 he was appointed chamber painter to Queen Elizabeth II. In his service he resumed his activity as a painter of historical compositions. For her husband he made one of her most notable works, the Episode of the Conquest of Malaga (Royal Collections of National Heritage).

Famous in his time, Tegeo was the perfect victim, during the following years, of the prejudices of taste of art historians and collectors, who relegated his figure until he fell into oblivion. His political commitments to Liberalism colored his name and his creative activity, which also made him an early example of an ideologically committed artist to his contemporaries.

Artistic genres

He stood out as a painter of great religious compositions, as a painter of history and as a portraitist, just as the great masters who preceded him had done. But his rich personality did not accept the limits imposed on artistic genres and transcended the habits of his time to dedicate equal interest to the scenes of customs, the landscape and the urban views that he introduced into his compositions, as well as to sculpture, which gave him It served as inspiration, granting them the same relevance as the rest of his work.

Portrait

Portrait was the genre that brought the painter the most fame and money throughout his life. From the beginning of his career, it provided him with a stable and constant clientele, which also allowed him to face with some freedom his position vis-à-vis the large institutions, from which he managed to remain relatively independent. Close to the Royal House, he was not a Chamber portraitist until the end of his career, but he maintained a constant client relationship with the most notable figures of the court from the first years of his production. His inevitable public position as a liberal artist, which first made him live through a process that revealed his militancy and then made him a constitutional councilor of the Madrid City Council, also influenced the profile of his clientele, who in some way expressed their commissions. affinity with said position, which inevitably meant progress and modernity in the Spain of his time.

Tegeo's first portraits are based on the assimilation of the Enlightenment tradition, but amalgamated with the lessons on neoclassical taste learned from his teachers at the Academy. His trip to Italy deeply affected his portraits, giving them a singular cosmopolitanism, strange in national repertoires and which in reality had no continuity, but which opened the possibility of a certain experimentation with historical models that were not present in the Prado Museum. References to Bronzino, Velázquez and Goya are also present in the elaboration of a portrait model that will finally emerge, in the 1940s, in paintings with deep attention to the psychological dimension of its models, concentrated and subtle, in the that the artist used astonishing realism when reflecting the sumptuous details that defined, in his time, the taste for novelty.

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  Pedro Benítez and his daughter María de la Cruz, c. 1820, Museo del Prado

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  Angela Tegeo, daughter of the painter, c. 1832, Museo del Prado

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  Pedro Martínez, 1839, Museum of Romanticism

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  Antonia Cabo with her sister and her son Mariano Barrio Cabo, c. 1839, Museo del Prado

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  Jacinto Galaup, 1845, Museum of Romanticism

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  María del Pilar Ordeig, 1845, Museum of Romanticism

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  José Antonio Ponzoa and Cebrián, 1845, Museo del Prado

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  Portrait of knight, 1845, Museo del Prado

Religious painting

Tegeo began his public career dedicated to religious painting and consolidated his prestige after completing several sacred commissions. From Italy, in the years when his artistic training was culminating, he sent works inspired by Sacred History and upon his return, at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, he presented other religious works to consolidate his status as an artist.. Among them, the Immaculate Conception demonstrates his use of historical language, alluding to Raphael and Murillo in the same painting. In the Italian years, deprived of a pension, he must have made a living with competitive and persuasive artistic production, capable of attracting the European public that visited the Eternal City. Thus, the Madonna of the Goldfinch, preserved in the Museum of Romanticism, is the only testimony that we know of that unknown activity, which must have been very fruitful and in view of this work, capable and successful. In it he once again uses alternative historical models to those dictated by the Academy's standards, undoubtedly attentive to the exaltation of the sensitive humanity of the protagonists and in which the landscape already acquires a development of maximum interest.

Already in Madrid, the commission for the large altar palate for the temple of San Jerónimo el Real, in situ today, satisfied the promise made to the artist by Ferdinand VII, who could not pension him, to grant him a great commission that would compensate him for the efforts made in Italy. The result, received lukewarmly, was a formal sophistication unusual at the Court, in which the models of Bolognese classicism and the tradition of the great Italian baroque were fused with Davidian models. The acquisition of the presentation sketch by the infante Sebastián Gabriel for King Ferdinand marked the definitive settlement of Tegeo at court and the start of a career that would later transform him into a painter of History, the most valued specialty in the media. academics.

History painting

Tegeo was recognized as a History painter “of high and well-deserved credit” despite the meagerness of his production within this genre. His prestige, first consolidated through religious painting, was transformed, once established at Court, as a creator of mythological and then historical images, almost always on commission. In the first ones he was very attached to the Davidian forms, as happens in those commanded by the infante Sebastian Gabriel: Antílochus bringing to Achilles the news of the combat over the corpse of Patroclus and Diomedes i>, assisted by Minerva, wounds Mars. The rigorous drawing, a classicism coined in Paris and, above all, the sensual presence of the classical heroic nude, are present in all of them as an indelible personal stamp that remains recognizable in the demanding quality of the execution, as well as in a characteristic tempered intonation., as in Hercules and Antaeus. Although, in the Battle of Lapiths and Centaurs, Tegeo finally freed himself from those learned formulas to openly embrace the language of the old Italian baroque tradition, which he handled with greater comfort, and which was one of the great milestones of his public career.

However, the substantial weight of his fame is fundamentally due to a single work that must be considered the main one within his complete production, Ibrahim-el Djerbi, or the Holy Moor, when in The Marchioness of Moya's shop attempted to assassinate the Catholic Monarchs (Sitio of Malaga), commissioned directly by King Francis of Assisi, and which in a visionary way already advanced the formal characteristics of a genre that had just been born. and that it would not see its first splendor until the end of the same decade in which Tegeo painted this work, when the artist had already died. The use of a markedly persuasive and theatrical formal language, the taste for striking and historically accurate settings, as well as the large format with natural figures, are elements that proliferated in the practice of the genre after Tegeo proposed them in Spain In this play.

Exhibitions

The stylistic and taste changes that took place at the end of the 19th century made the work of many painters of the first half of the century lacked the deserved recognition. Rafael Tegeo's work was especially affected by this situation, since during the author's own lifetime his political significance had made a dent in his career.

In 1902 the National Portrait Exhibition was held, in which one thousand six hundred and seventy-five pieces participated, only two of them by Tegeo, the portrait of Valeriano Salvatierra and one of the versions of the portrait of The Dukes of San Fernando de Quiroga.

A few years later, interest in this type of collections began, although in a very inconspicuous way, as can be seen with the celebration of the Exhibition of Spanish paintings from the first half of the 19th century, organized in 1913 by the Spanish Society of Friends of Art, and which featured three works by Tegeo, one of them the Portrait of a Girl Seated in a Landscape, from the Prado Museum. Five years later, said Society held another exhibition Exhibition of portraits of Spanish women by Spanish artists before 1850, which only featured a female portrait signed by the Murcian.

In 1921 the exhibition Three Rooms of the Romantic Museum was held at the headquarters of the Spanish Society of Friends of Art, an exhibition that would be the seed of the museum of the same name that would open its doors three more years afternoon. Both that exhibition and the first assembly of the new institution included the representation of works by the Caravaca painter.

In November 1928, the Exposition d'art espagnol, 1828-1928 was held in Brussels, which included the work Pedro Benítez and his daughter María de la Cruz, work that would be exhibited again, this time at the 1934 Venice Biennale, in the Spanish pavilion, and in theExhibition of exemplary portraits, 18th and 19th centuries. Madrid Collections, held in Madrid in 1946.

Once again, the Spanish Society of Friends of Art held another important exhibition in 1951, the Exhibition of Elizabethan Painting, 1830-1870, where the Inmaculada (Heritage) could be admired. National) and the portraits of Jacinto Galaup and his wife, María del Pilar Ordeig, donated in 2017 to the Museum of Romanticism.

The presentation of the collections of the 19th century of the Prado Museum in the Casón del Buen Retiro in 1971 and the studies increasingly systematic aspects of the art of that century crystallized in the revaluation of this period. Rafael Tegeo's work participated in several exhibitions organized by the Madrid art gallery, such as Portraits of a child in the Prado (1983) and The Spanish painters of the 19th century. From Goya to Picasso (Moscow and Leningrad, 1987) or the fundamental exhibition on the painting of the 19th century Prado and other collections, from 1992, curated by José Luis Díez. Since then, both the paintings of Tegeo and other nineteenth-century authors have been more present in various exhibitions, highlighting the one held in 2007 by the Prado Museum, which gave way to the collections of this century to the main building of the art gallery.

Between 2018 and 2019, the first monographic exhibition dedicated to the painter, Rafael Tegeo (1798-1856) was held at the Museum of Romanticism composed of more than thirty works from both the museum itself and the Prado Museum, National Heritage, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, the National Library, the Museum of Fine Arts of Murcia, the Zuloaga Museum and Spanish and foreign private collections. In addition, in this exhibition the work was exhibited < i>Battle of Lapitas and Centaurs before its final arrival at the Prado Museum, to which it was bequeathed by the American historian William B. Jordan.

Work in collections

In the Naval Museum of Madrid:

• Portrait of Don Alvaro de Bazán, first Marquis of Santa Cruz. Painted in 1828, it is a copy of an anonymous original from the house of the Marquess of Santa Cruz.
• Portrait of Frey Antonio Valdés and Fernández Bazán, Captain General of the Royal Navy, Secretary of State and the Universal Office of Marina. Painted in 1828. Copy from an original of 1788. This oil entered the museum in 1844, from the Marina Secretariat.
• Jorge Juan y Santacilia. Painted in 1828.
• Juan José Navarro, first Marquis of Victoria. Painted in 1828. Copy of an original of the centuryXVIII.
• José Patiño Rosales. Painted in 1828. Copy of an original by Jean Ranc.

In the Prado Museum:

• Portrait of ladyAbout 1838.
• Antonia Cabo, with her sister and her son Mariano BarrioAbout 1839.
• Pedro Benítez and his daughter María de la CruzAbout 1820.
• Battle of lapitas and centaurus1835.
• The Dukes of San Fernando de Quiroga (copy), 1835.
• José Antonio Ponzoa and Cebrián1845.
• Mariano Facundo Barrio GarcíaAbout 1839.
• María de la Cruz Benítez1827.
• The Dukes of San Fernando de Quiroga, facing a landscapeAbout 1830.
• Hercules and Anteo (bocet), 1828.
• Angela TegeoAbout 1832.
• The Last Communion of Saint JeromeAbout 1829.
• Girl sitting in a landscape1842.
• Portrait of knight1845.
• Portrait of lady1845.
• Hector by relieving Paris severely for his cowardiceink on paper, 1833 - 1856.

In the Museum of Romanticism:

• Virgin of the jilguero1825-1828.
• Pedro Martínez1839.
• Jacinto Galaup1845.
• María del Pilar Ordeig1845.

In the Royal Palace of Aranjuez:

• The ImmaculateIn the Queen's bedroom.

In the Royal Palace of Madrid:

• Episode of the Conquest of Malaga (The Holy Moor. Ibrahim el Djerbi1850.
• Fall of Faeton.

In the church of San Jerónimo el Real in Madrid:

• The Last Communion of Saint Jerome. It was painted for the main altar of this temple by order of King Ferdinand VII. It is currently presented in the presbytery of the church; it is a canvas of enormous dimensions inspired by the same theme of the Baroque painter Agostino Carracci. It corresponds to the canvas of the Prado mentioned above found in the church as a deposit.

In Caravaca de la Cruz:

• The healing of Tobiaspreserved in the Pinacoteca del Castillo.

At the José Luis Bello y González Museum in Puebla, Mexico:

• Agony of Cleopatra, exhibited in the Museum Music Hall.

At the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando:

• Portrait of lady with red shawl1824-27.
• Hercules and AnteoAbout 1836.

In the Museum of Fine Arts of Murcia:

• Portrait of the family Benítez BragañaAbout 1822.
• Diomedes, assisted by Minerva, hurts Mars1831.