“Everyone has an obligation to create art out of their life,” wrote Manuel Bartolomé Cossío, a prominent figure in pro-rebirth Spain and a professor at the Institución Libre de Enseñanza and a major advocate of public education and active pedagogy as a supporter of the Board. Board of Trustees of Pedagogical Missions. It was neither more nor less Joaquin Sorolla who made the art After depicting Cossío on two canvases.
One of these portraits, made by Sorolla in 1905, was kept by Archer Milton Huntington, founder of the Hispanic Society, after seeing it exhibited in London. The other, created in 1908, was given to Cossio himself by Sorolla and became c.It has now been purchased by the Ministry of Culture from a private collector. Prado National Museum. The art gallery is expected to present this week in Room 9 B, one of the most famous paintings in Spanish art, along with ‘The gentleman with his hand on his chest’ by El Greco.
Again price not announced What the government paid for this canvas of the Valencian artist, who until a few weeks ago exhibited ‘Sorolla in Black’ at the house museum, would cost no more than five figures, according to expertise. Magazine Ars Magazine published.
friend and admirer
But, Why did Prado ask Cossío to share a space with El Greco in his presentation? Besides being an outstanding educator, Cossio was also a major specialist in Art History. In 1908 – the year Sorolla painted it for the second time – the intellectual published his monographic work on El Greco, a fundamental milestone in the formation of the Art History of Spain, incorporating Cretan painting into the Western canon. . A copy of this book on El Greco, dedicated by Cossío himself, is still kept in the library of the Valencian painter’s house-museum in Madrid.
To Sorolla and Cossio united in a great friendship and a similar understanding of art and education. In fact, the painter took his children to the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, where Cossío was a professor.
In two portraits of her friend, Sorolla showed her appreciation for him, emphasizing the grace of the caregiver, enhanced by the subtlety of gray tones, with a look that pierces the category of moral and intellectual.
secret portrait
But at the same time, more or less subtly, Sorolla also spoke of Cossío’s passion for art in general and the Cretan painter in particular. Two Sorollesque portraits of Cossío show “the gentleman with his hand on his chest”.The similarity with the pedagogue’s factions was also striking. However, as Javier Barón, Head of the Prado Museum’s Department of Preservation of 19th Century Painting, points out, Sorolla referred to El Greco not only as a demonstration of the historical research undertaken by Cossío, but also as a reference to his Spanishness and nobility.