When asked why Pablo Picasso didn’t write his autobiography, he is said to have said, “Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.” The magnificent catalog that the critic and professor Pilar Tébar gave us about the Alicante painter José Aparicio (1770-1838) made us wonder about the emergence of the sage painter from Malaga.
With beautiful and influential paintings, Aparicio Inglada presents us with his life and artistic marvels in Villa y Corte, a wonderful itinerary of his intense existence and circumstances, from his hometown where he did his “little work” until his death. There is also a section of the history of Spain represented in many of his works. His career, IV. to be able to study in Paris and Rome. He flourished when he was about to turn thirty on a pension, which he received by the grace of Carlos. Rooms that helped the young Alicante get to know the work and make friends with masters such as the neoclassicist David, the Bonaparte painter or the orientalist Ingres, whom he would meet in Rome.
In the city of the Tiber, Aparicio was the king of exiles IV, who gave him an artistic pension. It coincided exactly with Carlos and María Luisa. The Alicante artist soon had the honor of being elected a member of the Accademia di San Luca, a prestigious Roman institution founded in 1593. The name of the Holy Apostle came to the Accademia because Lucas is considered to be the patron of painters according to legend, unfortunately this holy man was the author of the first portrait of the Virgin Mary… The importance of choosing Aparicio because he was guaranteed to be a member of the Accademia. Among its members were important sculptors such as Bernini or Canova.
After a long journey and a complicated apprenticeship, José Aparicio returns to the Madrid Court at the age of 45, when Napoleon’s defeat and the eponymous monarch VII. Alicante, Her Majesty’s Chamber Painter, and shortly thereafter as vice-president of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. But all this magnificent career did not help Aparicio to be considered an important artist for many years, because he went unnoticed and unknown to the general public. He was even sometimes mistreated by a liberal critic who scorned Fernandino for showing himself so close to the absolutist power of Fernandino.
Pilar Tébar, an excellent connoisseur of the artist’s work, to whom we owe this magnificent exhibition that triumphantly toured Valencia and Alicante, describes Aparicio’s work as “unequaled quality” because his canvases are sometimes geared towards “magnification and propaganda.” » about the royal family he knows and to whom he owes his artistic survival, for example the monarch IV. In her documented work on Aparicio, Pilar Tébar points out, curiously or not so much, that when the Alicante painter died, “some of his paintings were sold for higher prices than those of Goya and Velázquez.” “He was the most important artist in Alicante in the first decades of the 19th century”, which is no small thing.
In this magnificent catalog, which is a beautiful compilation of a complete exhibition, Dr. Pilar Tébar not only tells us about the life and works of José Aparicio Inglada, we come back to the words of Pablo Picasso. The beginning of these lines reminds us of the value of the painting as a reflection of an intensely lived period.